Support Desk

Can I use it?

Logging a ticket

Two ways in:

• The ? button in the bar at the top of any page, then Log a Support Ticket. This works from wherever you are.
• Menu ▸ Support Desk ▸ Log a Support Ticket

Writing a ticket that gets fixed quickly

1. What you were trying to do - "capture a scoresheet for order 12345".
2. What happened instead - the exact message if there was one. Copy the wording; do not paraphrase it.
3. When - roughly what time, and whether it happens every time.
4. Attach a screenshot if you can. One picture usually saves a day. If you email the desk instead, pasting the screenshot straight into the message works just as well as attaching it.

Choose the category and priority honestly. Marking everything urgent is how genuinely urgent things get missed.

If none of the categories fits, choose Other. A box appears underneath asking Which category is it? - type a few words, such as "Printer toner". The ticket cannot be sent with Other chosen and that box empty, because "Other" on its own tells the desk nothing.

If you cannot sign in

The ? button on the sign-in page opens an anonymous ticket form. Being locked out is exactly when you need the desk most, so it does not require a login. You get a reference you can use to check progress.

Following your ticket

Menu ▸ Support Desk ▸ My Support Tickets

Open a ticket to read replies and add more information. If an agent asks a question, answering it quickly is the single biggest thing you can do to speed the fix up.

If you are a Support Desk agent, the tickets assigned to you are listed here too, marked Assigned to you, and open in the agent workspace so you can work them. Only tickets in queues you can see are listed. On a ticket assigned to you, Waiting on me means it is waiting on the person who logged it (or on a third party), not on you.

You can also ask the AI Assistant "show me my open tickets" - your own tickets need no special role.

You can simply reply to the email. Every notification the desk sends you can be answered like any other message, and your reply lands on the ticket it came from - you do not have to sign in to keep a conversation going. Reply to the notification itself rather than starting a fresh message, so it attaches to the right ticket. (This depends on your organisation having set reply-by-email up. If your replies do not appear on the ticket, tell your administrator - collecting a mailbox and telling people which address to reply to are two separate settings, and the Inbound Mail Triage page shows them side by side.)

Every reply carries the conversation so far. Underneath the new message, below a line reading Earlier on this ticket, is what was reported and everything said since, oldest first - so you can read the whole exchange without signing in or hunting through old emails. On a very long ticket only the most recent messages are included and a line says how many were left out. Type your answer above that line; anything below it is treated as quoted history and is not added to the ticket twice.

Every email also carries a Track this ticket here link that needs no sign-in. It shows the ticket's status and the same full conversation, starting with the request you sent, and stays valid for as long as the ticket is open.

Working the desk

These pages need a Support Desk role.

Agents see the queues they are a member of. Supervisors see every queue in the company and can reassign, merge duplicates and reopen closed tickets.

To look at one person's tickets, pick them in the Agent box on the Support Queue. The list then shows only the tickets assigned to that person, and the Open, Pending, Resolved, Closed and All buttons count only theirs - click through them to see how much they have open, waiting and finished. Export to Excel exports the same tickets and names the person at the top of the sheet. The box lists everyone with at least one ticket in what you are looking at, and the number beside each name is how many tickets you will see if you pick them. Picking someone switches off Assigned to me and Unassigned, and switching either of those on clears the Agent box. You only ever count tickets you can see: an agent's view covers their own queues, a supervisor's the whole company.

Overdue emails go to the assigned agent only. When a ticket misses its first-response or resolution target, the agent it is assigned to is emailed once for each - nobody else. A ticket with nobody assigned goes to the Support Supervisors and Support Admins instead, so someone can allocate it.

You are told when somebody answers on a ticket you hold. When the person who logged it replies - in the app, by email, or by reopening it with a reason - the agent it is assigned to gets an email and a notification in the bell menu. The email carries the whole conversation underneath the new message, so you can pick the ticket up from your phone. A ticket nobody is assigned to notifies its queue instead.

An internal note tells the agent who holds the ticket. Notes are how one agent hands another what they have found out, so the assigned agent is emailed and notified when somebody else leaves one - including when an administrator files a stray email onto their ticket as a note. You are never notified about your own note, the requester is never told about any note, and a ticket with nobody assigned notifies nobody.

Picking Other in the Category box under Properties does not save straight away. A Which category is it? box appears underneath: type what the category actually is and press Enter or the tick to save both together. Every other category saves the moment you pick it, and moving a ticket off Other clears the text.

Picking Resolved in the Status box under Properties does not save straight away either. A box asks for the resolution summary - what was wrong and what fixed it - and the ticket moves to Resolved when you click Save. Cancel leaves the status as it was. If the ticket was resolved before and has been reopened, the earlier summary is filled in for you to update. You can also resolve while replying: pick Resolved under Set status on send and fill in the summary box that appears.

A ticket filed under the wrong company is moved, not logged again: open it and pick the right company in the Company box under Properties. You can only move it to a company you hold a Support Desk role in, and you are asked to confirm, because the ticket then belongs to that company's support team and may leave your own queues. The site is cleared, the queue is re-routed if it belonged to the old company, the SLA targets are recalculated for the new company, and the move is recorded in the ticket's history.

If you can work a ticket you can also delete it: the bin icon at the end of its row on the Support Queue, or Delete ticket under Actions when you have it open. You are asked to confirm first. The ticket leaves the queue and the requester's list and its SLA reminders stop; the requester is not told. Nothing is erased: a Support Admin can see every deleted ticket, and restore it, under Administration → Support Desk → Deleted Tickets. Keep deleting for tickets that should never have been logged. For junk mail use Discard as spam instead, which also blocks the sender.

Administrator setup

Support Admins configure the desk under Administration → Support Desk: Settings, Statuses, Priorities, Categories, Queues & Agents, SLA Policies, Work Types, Canned Responses, Inbound Mail Triage, Outbound Mail and Deleted Tickets. You do not need to be a system administrator to see this - holding Support Admin is enough, and the Administration menu then shows you only the Support Desk section. The day-to-day screens stay in the Support Desk menu.

Deleted Tickets is the other side of the Delete button: every ticket taken off the desk, when, and by whom. The counts at the top include how much logged time is sitting on deleted tickets - time the Support Hours report no longer shows. Restore puts a ticket back on the queue exactly as it was and adds an internal note saying who deleted and restored it. The requester is not told, its SLA dates are unchanged (so it may come back overdue), and a ticket discarded as spam keeps its sender blocked from the anonymous form until the 30 days run out.

Settings holds four things you can change yourself, which take effect immediately:

• Turn incoming email into a ticket automatically. On by default. Off holds new messages on Inbound Mail Triage instead - and replies to tickets that already exist still go through either way, so turning it off never loses a reply.
• Default queue. Where a ticket goes when nothing else chose a queue: no category was picked, the category has no queue of its own, or an email arrived on an address no queue claims. A category that names a queue still sends its tickets there. Blank means General; a confidential queue cannot be the default.
• Tell every technician when a fault is logged. On by default, so the whole team sees every incident as it is logged and someone already on site can pick up a second fault there. Off tells only the members of the ticket's queue. Support Admins are told about every new ticket either way. A queue marked confidential notifies only its own members, whichever way this is set - and its Support Admins only if it has no members at all.
• Allocate new tickets automatically. Off by default - a new ticket arrives unassigned so a manager allocates it or a technician picks it up.
• Default sender address. The address support mail is sent from. Blank uses the address the rest of the system uses. It must be a mailbox your mail provider has verified as a sender, not an alias that only redirects.

The mail pages are worth knowing about: tickets can arrive by email as well as through the form, and replies can go back out by email, so somebody who never opens ThreadWare can still be supported.

Email into the desk is off until it is switched on, and it is off on a new installation. Once it is on, ThreadWare collects a mailbox on your own mail server every few seconds, turns what it finds into tickets, and removes each message from the server once it has been safely filed - so the folder empties itself. A copy of every message is kept inside ThreadWare for 30 days first, so nothing is lost if something is handled wrongly.

The top of Inbound Mail Triage shows whether mail is actually being collected, from which server and folder, when it last looked and - when something is wrong - what the mail server said. If it is not running, the card names the reason. Switching it on is a server task: see THREADWAREV4_INSTALLATION_MANUAL.md section 7. Which queue a message lands in is set in the app, on the queue's Inbound mailbox field.

Three behaviours to know: mail from an address with no ThreadWare account becomes a ticket like any other (only the Turn incoming email into a ticket automatically setting above holds it on Inbound Mail Triage instead); when you do raise a ticket from a held message with Create ticket, the dialog asks you to choose the company it belongs to and will not pre-select one for you if you work in more than one - pick it deliberately, because that is where the ticket lands; and inbound mail is stored as plain text, so an HTML message keeps its words and line breaks but not its layout. Pictures are kept: a screenshot pasted into an email, a photo sent from a phone and an ordinary attachment all land on the ticket as files. Pictures emailed before 10 September 2026 can be pulled back from the emails the desk has kept (30 days by default) with Recover missing attachments at the top of Inbound Mail Triage.

When something looks wrong

Related guides

• Getting started - many tickets turn out to be a missing role.
• Risk / Incident Management - for a physical problem rather than a system one.
• All guides