In this article, we'll give you a quick introduction to company Spaces in Helprace:

• Space types
• Spaces in the user portal
• Setting up Spaces
• Space restrictions

Space types

Here are the types of Spaces you can set up in Helprace:

• Space
• Product
• Service
• Forum
• Department

To select your Space type, head to Settings > Spaces and select the Space type.

Spaces in the portal

In the example above, we chose "Space" as our Space type, and that means the words "Select Space" will appear below your company logo on the portal homepage.

You can customize how the Spaces menu and block appears on your pages. To learn more about blocks, take a look at Customizing your homepage.

Setting up Spaces

Only Owners and Admins can access this. You may want to familiarize yourself with User roles and staff privileges 

Point to the   Wrench and select Spaces.

• A "General" Space. is the default Space. You cannot delete it.

• Drag and drop your Spaces in the desired order. 

• Edit the name and the Space icon. The icon is recommended to be 32x32 pixels to show up properly.
• Add a description. This description can be shown or hidden on your user portal's homepage by heading to Settings > Main Home Page and checking Show Page Descriptions. 
  The description will show up under the link to your Space in the user portal. The below Space types are "Services": 

If you only have one Space, modifying its name and icon will not result in any changes. That's because Helprace can only display this information when you toggle between Spaces. These changes will be visible once you add a second Space.

Deleting a Space with any content in it (articles, topics, categories) will delete the content, too.

Space restrictions

Point to the   Wrench and select Spaces. Click on your space.

Public restrictions

"No Restrictions" makes the space public, while "Staff & Registered Users" requires users to register to view it.

Internal restrictions

You can create a portal accessible only by your team members. This can be done by changing restrictions of a space.

• Select "Staff Only" to give access your team: Agents, Admins and Owners. Whether registered or unregistered, users will not see it.
• Select "Nobody". This is a top-secret space only available to your Admins and Owners.

Custom restrictions

With custom restrictions you can select what Teams, User Groups or Organizations have access to a Space.

Here are some situations where you'd want to restrict your documentation or community around specific individuals.

Registered users

A public community for all registered users (just like Staff & Registered Users).

VIP clients

A community for Tier 3 support agents and certain customers who are VIP.

Beta testers from ACME Organization

A community for all staff as well as all users who belong to the ACME organization.

Beta testers from all Organizations

A community for mid-level agents and all users who belong to Organizations.

Private paid customer forum

A private community for paid customers. All paid customers belong to User Groups.

Billing & refund staff

A community for top management and those with the authority to issue billing & refunds. Owners and Admins will have access to this community by default.

Restrictions are applied with OR logic. If a user's Organization or at least one of the user's User Group has access to a certain space, then the user can access it.

If all fields are blank, then no one will be able to see these spaces except Admins & Owners.

If you want to share tickets within one Organization, you don't need Spaces. Depending on your Organizations settings, your can limit users to their own tickets only, to see all Organization tickets, or collaborate on all Organization tickets.

In this article we'll look at how the Apps work, how to disable and enable them, as well how the web portal looks from your customer's perspective.

Turning Apps on / off

Head to  Settings > Apps

Click on the app thumbnail to see more details about the app. It also shows a green "App is installed" message here, if it is enabled.

Clicking the Install or Uninstall button on this page will install or uninstall the app. Please give it a few moments as it reloads the whole web page after you click one of these buttons.

Apps vs. Community Support Channels

While Helprace Apps control what's visible to your agents and customers when they access your support system, support channels are specific to the Community App.

For example, if you'd like to track customer requests with a ticketing system, share documentation and collect praise, you'll need to enable the following Apps:

• Tickets
• Community
• Knowledge base

Then you must disable Questions, Ideas, Problems from view, leaving only the Praise channel visible in the User Portal.

Hiding community support channels from view

You can hide specific channels from view in your User Portal by unchecking "Enable This Channel" in Settings > Community. All data will be saved and accessible in the Admin Panel, however.

You can also hide updates, knowledge base, questions, ideas, problems and praise channels the same way.

You have the option of choosing whether or not you want Questions, Ideas, Problems, Praise, Knowledge Base, and Updates channels to appear in your User Portal.

Head to the Settings page.

If you don't see them, it means your Community app is uninstalled. Check this article to learn how to install the needed app: Customize your User Portal and Admin Panel with Apps

Open a channel that you do not wish to see in your Support Portal and disable it. Here is how you can disable Questions, for example:

1. Select Questions under Community.
2. Uncheck "Enable This Channel".
3. Click Save.

Here is how the user portal looks before you disable Questions:

Here is how it looks after Questions channel is disabled:

As you can see, this removed Questions from the menu on the left, Question tab from the widget and every other mention of Question in the portal.

You can repeat these steps for every other channel you wish to remove. Removing channels from the portal doesn't remove them from the admin panel. You can keep using them internally.

In this video, you'll learn how to turn your Helprace account into an ideas lab. If you only need customers to be able to share their ideas with you, you can do that by turning off all other modules and channels.

In the video I’m starting with a fresh clean account right after I’ve signed up. But you can follow these steps any time.

Here how the user portal looks. You can see the community channels, tickets, and knowledge base enabled.

Let’s go to the Admin Panel.

Navigate to Settings and click on the Apps.

We need to turn off Tickets and Knowledge Base. The Community has to be enabled.

So I’m opening the Tickets app and click Uninstall. Go back when it is done. Don’t worry, all your data is saved.

The same for the Knowledge Base. Uninstall. Back.

Now,  I’ll go and turn off community channels one by one by unchecking “Enabled this channel” and clicking Save:

• Updates
• Questions
• Skipping Ideas, as we would need that channel.
• Problems
• Praise

The portal will now have a search field for users to search for ideas or suggest new ones and a list of ideas below.

If a user types something to the search bar, he will be presented with a list of matching ideas, or if the search gives no results, he will be redirected to the idea submission form.

Go to the Settings page in your Admin Panel.

Click on the Space Page on the left.

Scroll the right area down until you see the New Members block settings

Uncheck the "Show Block" setting under New Members and click Save.

If you have more than one public space, you would also need to click on the Home Page entry on this page and disable New Members there as well.

In the Admin Panel, select Spaces. 

Click Save.

Bulk import and export functions only work with your Community and Knowledge Base, not tickets or users.

Helprace accepts data in a CSV (comma separated value) files. A CSV file can be created or opened with software such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. You must fill out this table according to requirements outlined in this article.

To get started, follow these steps:

1. Head to Community
2. Pick one of the channels (e.g. Knowledge Base or Ideas)
3. Click the (...) button to the right of the search bar. 

You cannot import data by selecting All Topics, however you can export data in this fashion.

Importing data

Data importing limitations:

• Your CSV data table cannot have more than 2000 rows of data. If you exceed this amount, create another file to upload
• You cannot import topic while having All Topics selected (select a channel, e.g. "Knowledge Base" or "Questions" before importing)

Data can be imported to the following channels:

• Updates
• Knowledge Base Articles
• Questions
• Ideas
• Problems
• Praise

When you import data, it will be posted as you (the data will show up as being posted by the staff member who uploaded the CSV file).

The following fields are required:

Account upgrade

How do I upgrade my account?

account upgrade

04-04-2014

04-04-2014

answered

Status depends on the type of topic imported/exported: 

no_status

answered

no_status

under_review

planned

started

completed

declined

no_status

acknowledged

in_progress

solved

published

unpublished

Exporting data

Your data will be exported as follows:

• To your email address registered with Helprace, titled Export Ready for Download
• Either in Excel format (.xls) or CSV format (.csv)
• In a compressed ZIP folder

The following fields are defined in your exported file:

1234

1

2

ACME North America

1020

questions

200

ACME New York

What are your weekend hours?

Can't find them anywhere

hours open

Michael Kalman

2014-10-31T14:37:02+00:00

2014-10-29T10:26:08+00:00

2

0

4

0

answered

3

We are going to explore a wide range of options regarding your feedback widget.

• How your Feedback Widget works
• Setting up the feedback tab
• Launching the Feedback Widget with a link

How your Feedback Widget works

When the feedback tab is called up, it displays a smaller window in-site that allows you to navigate the portal. The main page of the widget is set up in a way to direct your attention to most important categories in your portal.

• frequently asked questions (questions that have been upvoted the most)
• top ideas (ideas that have been upvoted the most)
• common problems (problems most upvoted)
• new praise (most recent praise)

When you hover over a topic in the widget, it automatically shows a summary with the number of replies and what space (if any) it was posted in. Clicking on a topic will open the discussion in a new window.

Unlike in the portal, clicking the channel tabs above the search bar (ie, Ask a Question) will display the most popular topics in that channel. This is regardless the number of spaces you have in Helprace.

Submit a Request sends an email directly to your help desk. As the subject is composed, articles appear to the right of the message field. If the user isn't registered, they will be asked to provide an email address before sending their message.

Setting up the feedback tab

• Go to  Settings > Feedback Widget
  
  
• Select Tab as your Integration Type
• Tab Title, position and color can be set at this point.
• Selecting No Dialog for Tab Action means that clicking on the tab will take users directly  to the User Portal.
  If setup as shown above, your tab will look like this:

• Click Generate Code.

Your code will look something like this. You must copy/paste it into the HTML of the desired web page just before the </body> tag.

• Click Save

Launching the Feedback Widget with a link

You can make the widget open when user clicks a link you configured.

1. Head to  Settings > Feedback Widget
2. Select Own Link as your integration type
3. Click Generate Code.
4. Copy-paste the generated code into the HTML of the desired web page just before the </body> tag.
5. Use the generated click handler (onClick) with your own link.
6. Click Save