Help center › Set up
Email to ticket and the portal link
Your address
Every organization has one: yourslug@tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com. It is shown with a copy button under Admin › Settings › Email to Ticket and on the dashboard's first-run panel. An admin can give it a shorter name there (for example lusd@tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com); the full address keeps working, and replies to notifications come from the short one. Forward your existing help desk mailbox (help@yourdistrict.org) to it and keep telling staff to email the address they already know.
If you forward from Gmail, Google first sends a confirmation email with a code; it arrives in Beacon as a ticket, so the code is easy to find.
Department addresses
A department can have its own address, so HR mail goes to HR and IT mail goes to IT. Give its category an email key under Admin › Categories (or in Create a department under Teams): letters, digits and dashes, such as hr, payroll or facilities. The department is then 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 category: its team is alerted, its default priority and SLA policy apply, and if the team is private the request is read by that team and the owners only. Replies thread back into the ticket as always.
Admin › Settings › Email to Ticket lists every address with a copy button. Forward each department's mailbox (hr@yourdistrict.org) to its Beacon address and the general one (help@) to your plain address. A key nobody uses falls back to the plain address and leaves an internal note on the ticket saying which key was used, so a typo in a forwarding rule is easy to spot. Nothing has to be set up on Beacon's side for a new address: every address at the ticket domain already reaches Beacon.
What happens to a message
- A new message opens a ticket with the subject as the title and the body as the description. The sender becomes the requester.
- The sender gets one confirmation by email with the ticket number, the title and a link; replying to it adds to the ticket. It is marked as an automatic reply so out-of-office messages do not answer it. It is not sent for a reply into an existing ticket, to shared or robot mailboxes (help@, noreply@), to a first-time sender outside your domains, for a message more than a day old, or more than three times an hour to one address. A ticket the safety screen flags is confirmed by number only, with your crisis message.
- A reply to any Beacon notification threads back into the same ticket. Beacon uses a signed reply address for this, so a guessed ticket number cannot add a comment to someone else's ticket.
- Attachments come along, up to ten per message, under the same file policy as uploads (images, PDF, text and CSV, Office documents, logs, zip; 25 MB each).
- Auto-replies, out-of-office messages, bounces and list mail are ignored. Exact duplicates are dropped.
- Every inbound message is logged with what happened to it. If an email did not create a ticket, send hello@beaconhelpdesk.com the sender address and the time and we can tell you why.
The settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Accept email | Turn off to ignore all inbound mail for the organization. |
| Create requesters for unknown senders | On: a first-time sender gets a requester account. Off: mail from people without an account is rejected. |
| Allowed sender domains | Comma-separated. Empty allows any domain; yourdistrict.org, students.yourdistrict.org limits ticket-by-email to your own people. These domains also decide who counts as staff on the dashboard's progress panel. |
| Confirm new requests by email | On to start. Someone whose email opens a ticket gets the confirmation described above. If your old help desk still sends its own auto-reply from the forwarded mailbox, turn one of them off so people do not get two. |
| Add to the confirmation | Optional text shown above the link, such as office hours or who to call when something cannot wait. |
| Email people added by an import | Off keeps people who came from a file out of Beacon email entirely; they still see notifications in the app. |
The portal link
Staff sign in at app.beaconhelpdesk.com/login?org=yourslug. The dashboard's first-run panel shows the link with a copy button. In the portal a requester sees Home, their Requests, and public Articles, plus the devices assigned to them; they can submit a request, follow it, reply, and rate it once resolved.
The portal helps only people who can sign in. That means single sign-on with “Auto-create users” on, or accounts you invited or imported. Under Admin › Settings › Requester Portal you can switch the portal off, set the welcome title and text, hide the knowledge base from it, or Allow anonymous submissions (a request without sign-in; an email address is still required so the person can be told what happened).
Good places for the link: the staff intranet, the Google or Microsoft app launcher (Google Admin › Apps › Web and mobile apps; Entra › Enterprise applications, visible to users), and the Chromebook bookmark bar through managed bookmarks.
What people receive
Requesters are told, in the app and by email, when a technician replies and when the ticket's status changes; technicians when a ticket is assigned to them, when someone replies or leaves an internal note on their ticket, when a device is checked out to them, and when an SLA target is near or passed. The members of the team a ticket lands in are told about it, in the app and by email, unless they turn off New requests for my teams in their own notification settings. Someone who emails in a new request gets the confirmation above. Replies to any of these emails land back on the ticket. Internal notes never leave the team, and nothing about a private team's ticket, not even its title, is sent to anyone outside that team except the person who asked.