Workspace: how pings reach you

The Workspace tab is where you decide how the dispatch board reaches you. A ping is the board asking for you: a ticket about to breach, a customer waiting, a technician gone quiet. In the Workspace tab you choose which situations ping you, which tickets are yours to watch, when you are at work, how hard the board pushes when you leave a ping alone, and how loud it is. Dispatchers, service desk managers and customer success staff each have their own settings. Everything the setup wizard asks is here, and you can change it at any time.

Before you start: you need a role that can open the dispatch board: Administrator, Service Desk Manager, Dispatcher or Customer Success (see Opening the dispatch board). Your settings stay between the limits and locks an administrator has set. A setting an administrator has fixed shows Set by your admin and cannot be changed. When your server cannot keep your settings for you, the tab says "Saved on this computer only" and they do not follow you to another computer.

Open the Workspace tab

Select Workspace in the toolbar, or select Settings and then the Workspace tab. Changes apply as you make them. Typed values, such as numbers and times, are saved when you leave the field or press Enter.

Undo or reset your changes

The Your changes section keeps track of what you have changed from your role's defaults.

• Show what I changed lists every setting that differs from the defaults, in plain sentences.
• Undo last change puts back the settings as they were before your latest change. The board keeps your last three changes, and a line under the buttons tells you what the last one was.
• The reset button is named after your role, for example "Reset to the Dispatcher defaults". It asks you to confirm: select Reset to clear every change you made in this tab, or Keep my changes to cancel. Your canvas, Pulse, lists and tracked tickets are not touched, and you can undo a reset.

Accept a suggestion

When you choose "Stop showing this" on a ping three times for the same kind of ping and client within 14 days, the Suggestions from your dismissals section offers a change. It offers a mute of that client's pings of that kind for seven days (Mute it), a longer limit so the signal pings less (Raise it), or both. Each suggestion lists exactly what would change. Select Not now to put it away for this session. Nothing changes until you accept, and an accepted suggestion is one change that you can undo. See Needs you: pings and the focus card for how to stop a ping.

To end a mute, open the details of the signal under Tell me when.... Muted lists what is muted, each with a Remove button.

Set your role and how noisy the board is

Under Queue and noise:

P1 is the most urgent ping priority and P3 the least. A noise level of Calm or Watchful sets some of these values itself, and the control says so beneath it.

Choose which signals ping you

Under Tell me when..., each signal has a switch. There are 17 signals in four groups.

Open the details of a signal to tune it:

• Priority sets how urgent its pings are: Automatic, P1, P2 or P3.
• Its numbers set when it fires. Examples are Warn this long before the breach, Quiet for, Overloaded above, Untouched for and, for tickets waiting without an owner, Critical tickets wait, High tickets wait, Medium tickets wait and Low tickets wait. For Low tickets wait, 0 means never.
• Buttons on the card chooses which actions the ping's card offers, at most four, in the order you set.

Limit what can ping you

Under What can ping me, narrow the board to the tickets you care about. Lists are separated by commas, and an empty list means all.

• Which tickets can ping me: Unassigned only, Unassigned and mine or Everything.
• Only these teams and Only these priorities.
• Only these ticket types (Halo ids) and Skip these ticket types (Halo ids).
• Only these clients (Halo ids) and Skip these clients (Halo ids).
• My intake filter: for tickets nobody owns yet, a ticket pings you when it comes from one of your teams or is of one of your ticket types. Choose My own and list them, or No personal intake filter.

Set your working hours

Under Working hours, the board learns when you are at work. The days, hours and time zone start from your shift in HaloPSA where the board can read it.

• Time zone, for example America/New_York.
• Working days.
• Shift starts and Shift ends. An end earlier than the start means an overnight shift.
• Breaks: up to four. Select Add a break and set its times.
• Outside working hours: Only P1 pings or Nothing.

Say what counts as urgent

Under What counts as urgent:

• Priorities that mean act now: tickets with these priorities ping you as soon as they arrive.
• Breach warning: how many minutes before a breach a ticket may ping.
• Tickets with no Halo SLA may ping: shows whether your organisation counts an estimated SLA as a real one. You cannot change it here.
• VIP clients rank higher.
• Watched clients: ranked like VIP clients. Enter a HaloPSA client id and a name, then select Watch.
• A customer may wait (Critical), (High), (Medium) and (Low): how many minutes a customer may wait for a reply before it pings.

Choose how pushy the board is

How pushy decides what happens to a ping you leave alone. In every mode an ignored ping gets louder the longer it waits. In Standard and Strict mode, at its second level the board can also message you in chat if you have linked a Slack or Teams account. Gentle sends nothing.

Strict is offered only when your administrator allows it. The other settings in this section are:

• Ask why when I dismiss: always on unless the mode is Gentle.
• Snoozes per ping: counts in Strict mode only.
• Escalate a P1 after and Escalate a P2 after: three steps in minutes. A 0 means never, and the steps must grow.
• Nudge me in chat: Off, Where I am linked, Teams or Slack. The board sends you a message when a ping stays unanswered. It appears when your sign-in is linked to a HaloPSA agent, and it needs a Slack or Teams account you have linked (see Nudges and escalations in Slack and Teams).
• Tell my lead about a ping nobody answered.

Change how the board looks

Under How the board looks:

• Density: Calm, Standard or Dense.
• Open the board grouped by: Agents, Clients, Ticket types, Priorities, Age, Stages, Guided or Lists. This is the view the board opens on. The toolbar's View control changes the view while the board is open, and names them Agent, Client, Type, Priority, Age, Stage, Guided and Lists.
• Recede: dim assigned tickets that are healthy so the ones that need you stand out.
• Numbers in the header: pick from Unassigned, Breached, Median wait, Clear streak, Critical, Open, SLA and Online. The first four show in the header and the rest sit under More.
• Queue side: Left or Right.
• Animation: Full, Reduced or Off. Your computer's own motion setting can lower it, but never raise it. The toolbar's Motion control sets the same thing.
• Ping style: Ripple or Ring.

Set sound and notifications

On-screen messages always show. Under Sound and notifications, you choose when the board also plays a sound or sends a browser notification.

A P3 ping stays on the rail and never notifies or plays a sound. The tick plays only while the board tab is visible, because a hidden tab uses the browser notification instead. When several pings arrive together you hear one tick, and a ping that steps up to its second level plays a double tick.

A browser notification reaches you only when the board tab is in the background. The Alerts tab of the drawer has the same Browser notifications box, with the steps for allowing notifications in your browser: see Board configuration.

Describe your workflow

Describe changes your settings from a sentence. You review the change before anything is saved.

1. Select Describe in the toolbar.
2. Under What should change?, type what you want. For example: "only wake me for VIP clients, and keep it quiet after 6 pm". A sentence can be up to 1000 characters. You can also select one of the examples shown. Press Ctrl and Enter to send.
3. Select Describe.
4. Read the proposal:
   • What would change has one plain line for each setting.
   • Heads up lists warnings, and Not changed lists anything in your sentence that Describe cannot change.
   • Effect on your queue compares the board with and without the change, for example how many of your current pings it would change. New pings, No longer pinging and Re-tiered list the pings affected.
5. Choose what to do:
   • Accept applies the change as one change that you can undo. A change that would turn off most of your alerts needs a second press, labelled Yes, apply anyway. The dialog then shows how many changes were applied and an Undo button.
   • Edit in form closes the dialog and opens this tab with the change listed under "From your description". Nothing is saved until you select Apply these changes. Not now closes the list.
   • Discard drops the proposal.

Describe keeps the last six turns of the conversation, so you can follow a proposal with another sentence. The conversation is not stored on the server. Each person can use Describe up to 20 times a day.

Describe is not available when AI processing is paused for your organisation (see Pausing and resuming AI processing), when you have used your daily limit, or when your server does not support it. When AI processing is paused, the form opens instead. When you have used your daily limit, the board tells you to try again tomorrow or use the form. On a server that does not support Describe, the Describe button does not appear. The form in the Workspace tab makes the same changes.

Settings set by your administrator

Under Set by your admin, at the bottom of the tab, you can read what your administrator has fixed and the limits your settings stay between. Administrators and Service Desk Managers see a Team settings (admin) section here instead, where they set them. See Team settings and attention health.

Related pages

• Needs you: pings and the focus card
• Team settings and attention health
• Nudges and escalations in Slack and Teams
• Board setup wizard and tour
• Pausing and resuming AI processing