March 08, 2021 - by CSCS
Even though the previous solution has successfully served CSCS for a long time, it offered only an e-mail interface, mainly subject based and with limited capabilities. The time has arrived to make use of a more modern approach that allows a customization for the needs of CSCS and provides a very useful integration between issues and cases reported by users and internal workflows.
As of March 1st, the user community has a brand-new web interface with a user-friendly dashboard, which allows users to report new issues, upload relevant files and consult the status of open and past issues. The users no longer need to keep track of the email exchange and history, as everything is stored and is always available in the portal. In addition, the intuitive submission form guides the users to provide the relevant case information allowing CSCS staff to start addressing issues as soon as they are filed without the need of additional interactions to collect the minimum required information.
Another important aspect of the new service desk is the integration with a Knowledge Base feature, which allows an automatic search of relevant topics as users fill the case subject. This in principle can speed up the resolution of issues if they are already reported in the documentation. Moreover, the users can easily share their case with their entire groups if needed or just selected colleagues, and they can also take some independent actions, such as for example close their ticket with a simple click.
The new service desk is based on Jira, an Atlassian tool, which has the advantage of inheriting several useful features of Jira such as boards, filters, advanced queries, statistics etc., some of which could be shared with the user community and customers. The new service desk has been the result of a strong collaboration within the various teams at CSCS and hopefully will make the interaction of our users with the centre easier and more pleasant.
