Creating and managing categories

Categories help to classify an organization's data. You must have system administrator permissions to configure the categories for your organization. You can create categories based on the type of support offered, symptoms of the issues, or ticket resolutions. When an assignment is created, it inherits the category of the linked ticket. However, based on the assignment requirement, users can select a different category for the assignment. Categories are useful to classify an issue or a service level agreement. You can also use categories to run reports.

Using Priority Hierarchy, you can set an order of precedence for the Category, Requestor, Location, and Department modules. Based on the priority hierarchy that is configured for a group, a record is assigned a priority. For more information, see Defining Priority Hierarchy.

The following topics are provided:

Video

The following video (10.17) presentation provides information about categories in Track-It!

https://youtu.be/lsOph2BUrCY

Key features

While configuring categories, you can:

• Assign a default priority to a category, that auto-populates the value of the Priority field when a record is being created. However, while creating a record, users can select a different priority.
• Define a parent-child relationship for categories to segregate the data.
  For example, you can create a category named Hardware and then create a child category named Printer. You can create additional child categories for Printer such as HP, Canon, Epson, and so on.  
• Restrict requestors from accessing a certain category by using the Display in Self Service check box.
• Make a category unavailable to users by using the Mark as Inactive check box. Selecting this check box prevents user from creating a record by using a category that is marked as inactive. However, the existing references to that category are retained.
• Assign one or more support specialists for a category. A support specialist is a technician who is an expert in that area of work.

Out-of-the-box categories

Track-It! provides the following out-of-the-box categories:

• Account Administration
• Applications
• General Information
• Hardware
• Network
• Operating System
• Remote Connectivity

Based on your organization's business requirements, you can modify these categories or create new ones.

Creating a category

1. On the header bar, expand the hamburger menu  and select Configuration.
2. Click Lookups > Categories.
3. On the Categories page, click New.
4. In the New Category dialog box, in the Category Name field, enter a name.
5. To assign a priority to the new category, select an option from the Priority list.
6. To assign a parent category to the new category, select an option from the Parent Category list.
7. In the Description field, enter a description of the category.
8. (Optional) To enable requestors to use the category to create a record in Self Service, select the Display In Self Service check box.
9. (Optional) To prevent users from using the category, select the Mark as Inactive check box.
10. (Optional) To assign support specialists for the category, see Configuring support specialists.
11. Click Save.

Configuring support specialists

You can assign multiple support specialists for a category. If a user creates a record with a category that has a support specialist, the record is automatically assigned to that support specialist. If multiple specialists are assigned to a category, a record is assigned to technicians based on their names in an alphabetical order.

Editing or deleting a category

1. Navigate to the Categories page (hamburger menu  > Configuration > Lookups > Categories).

2. On the Categories page, perform one of the following actions:

   To edit the category	Select a category that you want to modify and click Edit. In the Category: categoryName dialog box, edit the required fields. (Optional) To assign or remove support specialists for the category, see Configuring support specialists. Click Save.
   To delete the category	Select a category that you want to delete, and click Delete  . In the Delete Record dialog box, click Yes.

Related topics

Creating and managing tickets

Creating and managing assignments