Help center › Set up
Departments on one desk
One help desk can take requests for technology, events, facilities, operations, transportation, food service, or anything else a school runs. In Beacon a department is two things that already exist, tied together: a team (the people who work its queue) and a request form on the portal (a top-level category shown to staff, with its own questions, and the team as its default team). Nothing else has to be set up for the right people to be told.
What staff see
The portal's New Request page starts with the departments as cards, in the order you set, each with an icon and a one-line description: Tech Request, Events Request, Facilities Request, and so on. Picking a card opens that department's form. When the department has subcategories, they come next as a short list (What kind of Events request?), with Something else for anything that fits none. Then the title, the details, the device if there is one, the department's own questions, and attachments. A line under the form says where it goes: Your request goes to the Events team. The page works on a phone, and every card and choice can be reached from the keyboard and read by a screen reader.
A district with no portal categories gets the plain form, as before. A district that does not require a category on every request (Admin › Settings › Tickets) also gets a Something else card, which opens the plain form with no department.
Create a department
Admin › Teams › Create a department makes both halves in one step: the name (the team and its card share it), a description and an icon for the card, the members, and the first questions. The form appears on the portal at once, after the departments already there; reorder it under Admin › Categories with the arrows, where you can also add subcategories, change the questions, attach an SLA policy or set a default priority. A category you hide from the portal (Show on requester portal off) is for technicians only and makes no card.
You can also build a department by hand: make the team under Teams, make a top-level category under Categories, and choose the team as its default team. That is all a department is.
Who is told
When a request lands in a team, through the form's default team, a technician's choice when opening a ticket, or an automation that routes it, every member of that team gets a New request for <team> notification in the app and by email, with the title and the description, and on their phone if they use the Beacon app. A request that reaches a team later, say an emailed request a technician or a rule moves into Facilities, alerts that team at that moment, the same way. The person who opened or moved the ticket is not told about their own change. A request the safety screen flagged is announced by its number only; the title and the description stay in Beacon. A member who would rather not hear about every new request turns off New requests for my teams under Profile & Settings › Notifications; nothing else changes for them. The Notify team automation action still works and is no longer needed for this; on a new ticket it skips the team the ticket is already in, so the starter Escalate urgent tickets rule does not tell the same people twice.
Each team's queue
- The sidebar lists your teams under My teams, each with its number of open tickets. Click one for that team's open queue.
- The Tickets page starts on My teams for anyone who belongs to at least one team, so a facilities technician sees facilities requests first. The Team filter switches to one team, to My teams, or to every team; the team shows as a column in the list. To start on every team instead, turn on Show all teams under Profile & Settings › Tickets.
- Saved views keep the team you chose, My teams included, so a shared view such as Facilities, overdue follows each member's own teams.
- Admin › Teams shows, per team, its members, its request forms and how many of its tickets are open.
Questions and subcategories
A department's questions are its category's form fields: text, numbers, dates, a choice from a list, a yes or no, and whether each is required and shown on the portal. A subcategory inherits its department's questions unless it has questions of its own, which then replace them; it goes to its department's team unless it has a default team of its own. Answers are kept with the ticket and show on the ticket page, and an automation's conditions can read them.
Private teams: HR and payroll on the same desk
Some departments handle requests the rest of the staff must not read: human resources, payroll, the counseling office. Make such a team private (the switch in Admin › Teams › Edit team, or in Create a department) and its tickets are read by the team's members and the organization's owners only. For everyone else they are not there: not in the ticket list or its counts, not in search or the command palette, not in the dashboard numbers, reports, Ask Beacon, the CSV or JSON export, the audit log (the number stays, the title does not), notifications or webhooks, and the ticket page itself refuses them. The technology team keeps working every other ticket exactly as before, and the team's name is still shown, so a technician can route a payroll question to HR and then no longer see it.
- Admins. Admin › Settings › Tickets › Admins read private teams' tickets decides whether administrators who are not on the team read them. It starts on, so one administrator can cover a department whose only member is away. Turn it off when HR's tickets must stay with HR; owners always read every team. An administrator the setting keeps out cannot let themselves in: only an owner turns the setting back on, and a private team they may not read refuses them a change of members, the public switch and a delete.
- The people who ask. The department keeps its card on the portal and a requester follows their own request as always. A technician who sends HR a question of their own sees that one request the way a requester would, and nothing else of HR's queue.
- Who is told. New-request alerts, replies, mentions and SLA notices about a private team's ticket reach the team and the requester, nobody else, whatever an automation asks for. A person outside the team cannot be mentioned on it. A technician who replied to a ticket before its team went private, or who was taken off the team, stops hearing about it with the rest. The safety alert to administrators still goes out, by ticket number only, as it always has.
- Assigning and moving. A private team's tickets can be assigned to its members only. Anyone may move a ticket into a private team (an emailed HR question that landed in the general queue); only a member or an owner moves one out, and the move is recorded in the audit log with both teams. A ticket routed in while assigned to someone outside the team arrives unassigned.
- Integrations. A webhook receives events about a private team's tickets only when an admin marks it Deliver private teams' events under Admin › Webhooks; an automation's webhook action never posts them. An API key reads what the person who made it may read, at their current role.
A department's own email address
Give a department an email key (the Email key box in Create a department, or on the category under Admin › Categories): letters, digits and dashes, such as hr or payroll. The department can then be reached at yourslug+hr@tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com and, for mail systems that will not forward to an address with a plus sign, at hr.yourslug@tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com. Mail to either opens the request in that department's category, so its team is alerted and its default priority and SLA apply; if the team is private, the request is private from the first second. Forward hr@yourdistrict.org to the HR address and help@yourdistrict.org to your plain address, and HR mail goes to HR while IT mail goes to IT. Admin › Settings › Email to Ticket lists every address with a copy button. A key nobody uses falls back to the plain address and leaves a note on the ticket saying so. See Email to ticket.
Operations, transportation, food service
The same pattern fits every department a school runs: one card, one team, one queue, the same ticket history, reports and SLA clocks as technology. Departments that do not use Beacon for anything else need only the portal link and an invitation for the people who answer. The icons offered for a card include a calendar, a building, tools, a bus, a plate, a megaphone, a graduation cap, a shield and a heart, next to the technology set.