The Co-managed Help Desk

Taskfire is an extension of the Autotask Client Portal. It is suitable for customers who have some internal IT, but don't need or want full-scale Autotask with its steeper learning curve. Refer to Overview of Client Portal and Taskfire Internal Help Desk.

The Autotask co-managed help desk is a set of features that allows you to set up selected customer contacts with an Autotask license that gives them access to your Autotask instance with the full power of Autotask, while allowing you, the MSP, to control exactly what co-managing users have access to.

There is considerable overlap of functionality between Taskfire and Co-managed Help Desk. To help you decide what is right for you, read this feature comparison.

This scenario is the basic case that is supported by the Autotask co-management features. The co-managing users work for the customer, and tickets are transferred between the co-managing users and the service provider's resources, based on expertise and availability.

The recommended setup is the one described in the Configuring Autotask to support Co-managed IT topic.

The end customer has an external consultant or another IT professional who is responsible for a specific part of their IT landscape. Many individual consultants may not have a ticketing system, giving the ITSM the opportunity to include them in the support and consulting offering.

This scenario would typically use the traditional configuration as described in the Configuring Autotask to support Co-managed IT topic.

The end customer has a resource responsible for non-IT activities, but no method of managing their tasks.

EXAMPLE  The customer has a Facilities resource who has to address building requests, or an HR resource who needs a ticketing system to track their work. Co-managed Help Desk can give the service provider an opportunity to resell access to a system that can assist those resources.

The key difference to the standard configuration is that every setting and configuration must be created to meet their specific need. For this scenario, it would not make sense to share the same ticket categories, workflows, and security levels.

This scenario should go through additional planning, scrutiny, documentation, and testing. Because of the additional configuration and considerations, this type of access comes with a higher overhead to maintain. Even though this is a scenario that we have seen implemented, we do not recommend this type of external access.

Notes and tips

• If you use this scenario in addition to scenario 1 or other co-managed help desk configurations, make sure your naming convention for the various configurations and settings are clear.

EXAMPLE  Consider a suffix or prefix of C_SRC (External Source) for departments, locations, workflow rules, etc.

• For these scenarios billing rates and costs are not an issue as both options would typically bill the end customer directly. Verify that the resources have a internal rate of $0.