Raising Tickets for Others

Raising a ticket for someone else

Most tickets arrive on their own — somebody emails the service desk, messages it, or raises one through the portal. But a good deal of service desk work starts with a phone call, someone stopping you in a corridor, or a job you are logging on a colleague's behalf after the fact.

That is what the New Ticket button is for, and this page is about the part of it people spend the most time on: saying who the ticket is for.

💡 The short version. Start typing a name or an email address in the Requester box and pick the person from the list. If they are not there yet, Add someone new is always the last option — and it keeps whatever you have already typed.

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Finding someone

Click New Ticket, and the first field is Requester. Type any part of a name or an email address — you do not need to know which — and matches appear beneath as you type.

Each match shows three things:

• The person's name
• Their email address, underneath, in smaller text
• Their company, on the right, if your installation hosts more than one

That last one matters more than it looks. Service desks accumulate people with similar names, and "Ed Mozley" at one client is a completely different person from "Ed Mozley" at another. The company is how you tell at a glance that you have the right one.

You can work entirely from the keyboard:

Key	Does
↓ / ↑	Move through the matches
Enter	Choose the highlighted person
Esc	Close the list and keep typing

Once you pick somebody, the box is replaced by a summary of who you chose — their initials, name, email and company. If you got the wrong person, the × on the right puts you back to searching.

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When they are not on the system yet

Sometimes the person genuinely is not there: a new starter, a contractor, somebody at a supplier, a one-off caller.

Add someone new is always the last option in the list. Not only when there are no matches — always. That is deliberate, and it is worth knowing why: if you are adding a new Daniel and the system already has another Daniel, a "no matches found" option would never appear. The one time you most need it is the time it would be missing.

Choosing it opens two small boxes for a name and an email address, and it keeps what you had already typed:

• If what you typed looks like an email address (it has an @ in it), it goes in the email box and the cursor lands in the name box.
• Otherwise it goes in the name box and the cursor lands in the email box.

Either way you never retype something you have already typed. Fill in the missing half and carry on down the form.

Changed your mind? Cancel and search instead takes you back to the search box with the list intact.

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Browsing instead of searching

Beside the search box there is a small magnifier. It opens a full list you can scroll and read as a table — name, email and company in columns.

It is there for the times you cannot remember enough to type: you know roughly who you are looking for, or you want to see who exists at a particular company. Clicking a row picks that person and closes the list, exactly as if you had searched for them.

Most of the time you will not need it. It is deliberately out of the way rather than the main route, because typing three letters is faster than reading a list.

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Why this replaced the old boxes

Before this, the form had two boxes — Requester Name and Requester Email — and you filled both in every time. Two things about that were quietly wrong.

The name box did nothing if the person already existed. FreeITSM has always identified a requester by their email address. Type an address it already knows and it attaches the ticket to that person's record — and throws away whatever you typed in the name box. So if the record said "Daniel Schipfel" and you typed "Dan Schipfel", nothing happened. The form appeared to be offering you an edit it was never going to make.

A typo created a whole new person, silently. Type danile@acme.com instead of daniel@acme.com and FreeITSM had no way of knowing you had slipped. It did what it does with any address it has not seen: created a new requester and filed the ticket against them. No warning, no duplicate check. You would find out when the real Daniel said he never got the update, and by then there were two of him.

Picking somebody from a list cannot do either of those things.

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What else it fixed

People raised this way now get filed under the right company. When you created a ticket for somebody brand new, FreeITSM used to add them without a company — even when their email domain clearly identified one. Everywhere else (the Users screen, staff signing in through your directory, single sign-on) worked it out from the domain; this one path did not. Their tickets then sat in triage indefinitely, and analysts who only look after that company could not see them at all.

Now the domain is used, exactly as it is everywhere else. If the domain does not match a company, they are still left unassigned — which is the honest answer rather than a guess.

And the list you search is now limited to your companies. The requester list — here and on the Users screen — used to return everybody on the whole installation, whichever companies you were allowed to work with. It is now limited to your active company, the same way tickets, assets and changes already were. If you host several clients, you no longer see (or search) one client's people while working on another's.

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Things worth knowing

• The picker is not a permission. The list only offers people you are allowed to work with, and the server checks again when the ticket is created. Being able to see a name and being allowed to file against it are two separate questions, and both are answered.
• Nothing else about the form changed. Send-replies-from, department, type, priority and description all behave exactly as before.
• It works on a phone. The list and the summary both fit a narrow screen without the form scrolling sideways.
• Existing tickets are untouched. This changes how a ticket is raised, not how one is edited. Changing the requester on a ticket that already exists is not yet possible from here.

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Related pages

• Tickets — the module as a whole
• Raising tickets for others — Developer Guide — how it works underneath
• Multi-Tenancy — Users and Self-Service — how requesters relate to companies
• Self-Service Portal — where requesters raise their own