Help Desk Management
A help desk team is a vital cog in any organization. The speed and accuracy of their actions directly impact the productivity of your users. Given proper tools, the capabilities of your help desk can be elevated above and beyond, ensuring that no business processes ever come to a grinding halt.
So what makes Adaxes the ultimate tool for all your help desk needs?
Web interface for help desk
Adaxes Web interface is what your help desk staff will see and use for their daily tasks. It enables access to your entire AD environment, including Exchange and Microsoft 365, from any web browser. Of course, this access can be restricted, but more on that later.
The Web interface follows "the tool should follow the process" principle. You can definitely use the UI that comes out of the box as is, but the unparalleled customization options will leave you wanting. Every UI element can be removed, renamed, or adapted to whatever tasks your help desk needs to perform, no code required. Add the cosmetic adjustments on top, and the Web interface will feel like an integral part of your corporate identity.
Not only you can customize the elements of the Web interface, but also the intricate behavior of every action. For example, you can make different buttons for creating different types of users, each with its custom form, predefined fields, and restrictions where in the directory these users can be created.
All these customizations drastically lower the learning curve of managing your environment. It is impossible to get lost in the depths of the menus or click on something you are not supposed to. Even junior help desk team members will be able to quickly grasp the concept and start working to their full strength in no time.
More about web interface customization
Help desk permissions
Every help desk team member needs some degree of access rights in your directory to do their job. Adaxes trivializes help desk permission management with the help of security roles.
In a nutshell, a security role is a set of permissions that you can grant somebody over something. For example, the members of the Help Desk group over the organizational units where your employee accounts reside.
There are zero restrictions on the scope of permissions. A user account from an Active Directory domain can get rights to manage accounts from any other untrusted domain or a totally unrelated Microsoft Entra domain. Your help desk technicians no longer need to juggle multiple accounts just to be able to do their job.
Besides, if you have multiple help desk tiers, you can leverage the permission inheritance feature. A security role assigned to a higher help desk tier doesn't need to repeat all the basic permissions – they can be inherited from a lower-tier role.
Adjusting the permissions of the entire help desk team boils down to updating one security role in one place. Compare this to modifying access control lists of OUs in Active Directory and calculate the time difference. You will be amazed.
A not-so-obvious feature is that directory objects and even entire elements of Adaxes Web interface automatically become hidden if the signed-in user has insufficient permissions. No rights to remove group members? No Remove Member button for you. No rights to add members to certain groups? These groups will not be displayed when selecting where to add a member.
As a result, your help desk technicians will never even attempt to do what they are not allowed to. This lets them maintain focus on the tasks they can and should do instead.
More about role-based security
Delegating complicated workflows
The help desk staff is usually sort of familiar with basic Active Directory, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 features. However, certain administrative tasks are beyond their competence. Or are they?
With the help of custom commands, you can delegate any complex multi-step workflow to your help desk team. Instead of performing everything manually step-by-step, Adaxes enables your help desk to execute predefined action sequences with one click.
The employee who executes a custom command does not need the permissions to perform every element of the sequence. You delegate the custom command as a package – the right to click a button that triggers a workflow which the help desk team would otherwise be underqualified to perform.
You can even insert custom PowerShell scripts into these workflows. The help desk staff will never know there are scripts involved unless you tell them. As simple as that, administrator-level tasks can be delegated to anyone in your IT department without any risk of a mishap.
Approvals for help desk actions
Speaking of risks, you can totally mitigate every possible risk inherent to delegation by adding an approval step to crucial actions. Approval might not be needed if an administrator adds a member to a privileged group. However, if someone from the help desk does it, you want to be on the safe side.
An approval request will be sent to a responsible employee once someone initiates an operation that, well, requires approval. Nothing in your directory will change until approval is granted. High-tier helpdesk staff can approve the actions of lower-tier staff. Experienced help desk team members can approve the actions of trainees. You get the idea.
This can greatly lift the overall skill of your help desk by allowing them to make mistakes in a live environment. In the worst-case scenario, you spend two extra minutes of your time reading an approval request email and denying it.
Monitoring help desk activity
No matter how skillful your help desk team is, their actions should always be subject to scrutiny. In the end, the security and efficiency of your organization depend on it. This is why Adaxes provides all the necessary logging and reporting mechanisms to ensure you always keep your hand on the pulse.
All actions of every user are logged, period. You can let your inner auditor relish when you decide to find out who added that user to that group a month ago. Even better, you can view the activity history of each help desk team member or a history of operations on each directory object separately, for an easily digestible perspective.
The built-in reporting platform enhances it further. Over 200 built-in reports and the capability to create custom reports based on whatever data you want. Literally. As long as you can get that data via a PowerShell script, Adaxes can create a report from it – nothing is off limits.
You can go as far as scheduling weekly reports based on help desk performance metrics from your ticketing system. And, of course, your help desk technicians will greatly appreciate handy reports based on the data from your directory. Recent password resets, group membership status, various Exchange reports, the list goes on forever.
All in all, Adaxes can make your help desk team a powerhouse that solves every user problem in a matter of minutes. And, if you add a little bit of automation, many of these problems will not even arise in the first place. It is a win-win for everybody – users are productive, help desk technicians work in a comfortable and controlled environment, administrators suddenly have plenty of free time, and your business runs like a well-oiled machine. So why not give Adaxes a try?