If you want to have an open department for pre-sales/sales questions and a closed department only accessible by customers you can do it with the Helpdesk following the steps below.
1. Enable anonymous access and ticket creation
Go to Components > MaQma Helpdesk, once in there, go to Settings > Configuration. In the tab General (default tab) set the option Anonymous User Access to YES. Then go to tab Tickets and set the option Anonymous Tickets to YES.
2. Set the departments
Go to Components > MaQma Helpdesk, once in there, go to Departments > Manage. By default, there will be one department created called “Support Services” (you can edit it if you want to or delete later).
- Open department: in the tab Applications you set which ones will be available under this department, normally Use Tickets would be set to YES but you can also enable any other option as well.
- Closed department: besides the tab Applications you must set the option Contract Access only to YES which will block ONLY the tickets area, if you want to block the department completely also set to YES the option Total disablement.
3. Set contracts on clients
3.1. Contract types
The first step to make use of contracts is the creation of the contract types, for that access Settings > Contracts > Contract types.
As anything (or almost anything) in Joomla! you'll get a table with the existing contract types already created. As common you'll see a toolbar on the top right corner with the options:
After pressing in New or Edit a page with a form will open with the following fields:
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Name: set a name for the contract type, example "6 months acess"
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Priority: the default priority for clients with the contract type
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Unit: set the unit for the contract type - Years, Months, Days, Hours, Tickets
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Value: set the value or in case of a time unit the duration of the contract type
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Description: place a more detailed explanation about the contract type if needed
You may create as many contract types as you need need.
Taking us, as an example, our customer support department only have the tickets management accessible to clients with valid subscriptions and we have 3 different contract types:
3.2. Contract components
To manage the Contract components, go to Settings > Contracts > Contract components. The idea of contract components is to relate products with contracts. While the contract types are required, the usage of this feature is not required.
An example of the contract components usage can be: you give support to two printers brands (X and Y), if a customer is requesting support to a print of brand X the support agents can check contract and see that it’s only for brand Y.
3.3 Create contract in client
After setting your contract types, you must create contracts for clients. For this you must go to Clients / Users > Client Manager and then edit an existing client. On the left side you'll find the tab Contracts, you'll see a list with the existing contracts for that client and below it a button to add a new contract.
