Desk settings

Desk settings hold the vocabulary of your service desk: the statuses a ticket moves through, the categories and subcategories that say what a ticket is about, and the category a ticket gets when Outpost raises it on its own. On the MSP plan you set these once as MSP defaults, and every client uses them until you customize that client. This page lists every setting, where it lives, and what it changes.

Where the settings are

Settings	Where	Who can change them
One desk’s settings (Enterprise), or one client’s (MSP)	Tickets > Desk settings. On the MSP plan, open the client first.	ticket:manage
MSP defaults for every client (MSP)	Inbox > Desk defaults	ticket:manage

Both pages have the same tabs: Statuses, Categories, Automatic tickets, and Notification emails. Desk defaults also has Clients. Technicians without ticket:manage do not see these pages, but they pick from the categories set here on every ticket. See Roles and permissions.

The Notification emails tab holds the emails sent to requesters. See Ticket notification emails.

Desk defaults also has Contact tags, the labels such as Primary contact and VIP that you give to people at each client. Every client uses the same set and cannot customize it. See Client contacts, sites, and contact tags.

Statuses

Every status belongs to one of six fixed status groups. The group decides how the desk treats a ticket in that status: the Status filter on the ticket list and the ticket views select by group, and reports count tickets by it under Status group. You cannot add, rename, or remove a group.

Status group	Built-in status	SLA clock in the built-in status
New	New	Running
Open	Open	Running
Pending	Pending	Paused
On hold	On hold	Paused
Solved	Solved	Paused
Closed	Closed	Paused

Solved and Closed are the resolved groups. A ticket moving into either one sends the requester the Resolved email, a parent moving into either one takes its open child tickets with it, and a ticket moving out of either one is reopened. When a ticket first moves into Solved, its requester is sent a satisfaction survey.

Add a status when one group needs a finer name, such as Waiting on parts in the On hold group. Select Add status on the Statuses tab.

Field	What it sets
Name	The name technicians see, up to 64 characters. The {{status}} placeholder in notification emails prints it.
Code	What rules, canned responses, and reports store: 1 to 32 lowercase letters, digits, or underscores. It cannot be changed after you save.
Status group	Which of the six groups the status belongs to.
Pause the SLA clock while a ticket is in this status	Whether SLA timers stop while a ticket is in this status. The SLA clock column shows Paused or Running. See Service level agreements.
Sort order	Where the status lists. Lower numbers list first.

Rules for statuses:

• The built-in statuses cannot be removed, and each keeps its status group. You can rename one or change whether it pauses the SLA clock.
• A status cannot be removed while open tickets are in it. Move them to another status first.
• The Status picker on a ticket lists every status, the ones you added included, grouped by status group. Canned responses (Set status) and workflows (Change a field) can also set a status you added. See Queues and canned responses and Workflows.

Categories

A category says what a ticket is about. It is set on New ticket and in the Category panel of each ticket, it is a filter on the ticket list, and the Tickets by category report groups tickets by it. A subcategory narrows one category, such as Printer under Hardware.

Built-in category	Code	Meaning
Incident	incident	Something that was working has stopped working.
Service request	request	Somebody needs something they do not have yet.
Question	question	Somebody needs to know how to do something.
Problem	problem	The underlying cause behind one or more incidents.
Change	change	A planned modification to the estate.

A ticket filed with no category is an Incident.

To add a category, select Add category. To add a subcategory, select Add subcategory under its category. Each takes a Name, a Code (same rules as a status code), a Description, and a Sort order.

Rules for categories and subcategories:

• The built-in categories cannot be removed. You can rename them.
• A category or subcategory cannot be removed while open tickets are filed under it. Recategorize them first.
• A category or subcategory cannot be removed while an automatic ticket source uses it. Change that source’s default first.
• Changing a ticket’s category clears its subcategory.

Automatic tickets

Some parts of Outpost raise tickets without a person. The Automatic tickets tab sets the category, and optionally the subcategory, each kind gets. With nothing set, the ticket is an Incident.

Raised by	Which tickets
Incident action items	Follow-up tickets raised from an incident review.
Compliance gaps	Tickets raised from a gap on the compliance screen.
Device compliance	Tickets raised when a device stays out of compliance past its grace period.
Chat	Live chats a technician promotes to a ticket.
Device management	Lost mode and expiring device credentials.
Software requests	Requests users make from the tray software catalog.

Choose the Category and Subcategory for a row, then select Save on that row. The default applies to tickets raised after you save it.

These defaults do not apply to tickets people open. A ticket an end user opens in the tray app is an Incident, and a ticket a technician creates takes the category chosen on New ticket.

Email senders

The Email senders card on the Automatic tickets tab holds Trust all senders, which decides how tickets that arrive by email treat senders Outpost cannot verify. It is a practice-wide setting: on Enterprise it is on Tickets > Desk settings, and on the MSP plan on Inbox > Desk defaults. It needs mailbox:manage.

With the switch off, the default, Outpost verifies each sender before it emails them back. Mail from a sender it cannot verify becomes a ticket marked Unverified sender that sends no email until a technician verifies the sender. See Sender verification.

Turn on Trust all senders and confirm with Trust all senders to treat every sender as verified. Every message then becomes a normal ticket, and replies go back to whoever sent it.

Caution

Anyone can forge the From line of an email. With Trust all senders on, mail from someone pretending to be a client becomes a ticket under that client, and your replies, with whatever they contain, go back to the forger. Leave it off unless your mail filter already blocks spoofed mail.

Mail that fails DMARC, and mail from a blocked sender, is still held in Suspended mail with the switch on. Each mailbox can override the switch in its Senders setting: Use the desk setting, Verify senders, or Trust every sender.

MSP defaults and per-client settings

On the MSP plan, Inbox > Desk defaults holds the statuses, categories, automatic ticket categories, and notification emails that every client uses until you customize that client. The built-in statuses and categories are listed there too, read-only, so the page shows the whole set a client ends up with. An MSP status or category cannot reuse a built-in code.

A saved change to the MSP defaults reaches each client that has not customized that area right away. A client that cannot be reached at that moment catches up within a few minutes.

What each row is

Each status, category, subcategory, and email shows where it came from:

Label	Meaning
Built in	Comes with Outpost. Every client has it.
MSP default	Comes from your MSP defaults.
This client	Added or changed for this client only.

Customize one client

Each client follows the MSP defaults area by area. The four areas are statuses, categories (with their subcategories), automatic ticket categories, and notification emails.

In a client’s Tickets > Desk settings, each area’s tab shows where it stands:

What the tab shows	Meaning	What you can do
Using MSP defaults	The client follows the MSP defaults for this area. The area is read-only.	Select Customize to edit it. Your first saved change makes the area this client’s own.
Customized for this client	The client has its own version of this area. MSP changes to it no longer reach this client.	Select Revert to MSP defaults, then Revert, to go back.

The notification emails have no Customize step: they can be edited straight away, and the first saved change makes them this client’s own.

Reverting an area removes the statuses, categories, and subcategories added for this client in that area, or replaces its emails or automatic ticket categories with the MSP defaults. Outpost refuses to revert statuses or categories while open tickets use a status or category that the MSP defaults do not have. Move or recategorize those tickets first. A built-in status or category renamed for this client gets its original name and settings back.

On Enterprise, there are no MSP defaults: every setting belongs to your desk and is always editable.

Clients tab

The Clients tab of Desk defaults shows how each client stands:

Column	Values
Defaults	Up to date (has your latest MSP defaults), Catching up (will receive them shortly), or Could not be reached.
Customized	The areas this client has customized, or Nothing.

The same tab holds the Requester portal address that notification emails link to. See Ticket notification emails.

Related

• Tickets
• Ticket notification emails
• Client contacts, sites, and contact tags
• Queues and canned responses
• Email to ticket
• Service level agreements