Work orders

A work order is a request for your facilities team: a leaking sink, a broken door, a room to set up. In schoolOS, work orders are tickets filed in your Facilities department. Everything in Tickets and Work a ticket applies. This article covers what's different.

Where work orders live#

Helpdesk › Work orders takes you to your Facilities department's inbox, usually at /facilities/work-orders. If your account has renamed the department or the module, it follows the new name.

• With departments turned on, you land in the Facilities inbox. It's titled Work Orders, and its button reads New Work Order. If you aren't a member of Facilities, you land in Helpdesk › Tickets instead.
• With departments turned off, or with no enabled Facilities department, you land in the ordinary Helpdesk › Tickets list, which holds every ticket.
• When Facilities is your primary department (an account schoolOS set up with Facilities), work orders keep the addresses with no prefix: the inbox is at /tickets, titled Work Orders, and inventory is at /inventory. Old /facilities/... links open there.

Helpdesk staff who work only in Facilities, and not in IT, never hit a dead end: opening Helpdesk › Tickets takes them to the Facilities inbox, and so does their homepage when it's Tickets.

The Work Orders inbox is the same inbox IT works its tickets in: the list with its views, filters, columns and bulk actions, and each work order in the split view with its properties rail on the right, macros and replies.

A direct link to a work order opens its full-page workspace while it loads. If it can't load, select Try again or Back to Work Orders to return to the list.

Every way to a work order opens it there, not in IT's Helpdesk › Tickets:

• Selecting a work order in a list, in Search, in a notification or email, on an inventory item's page, or in an Otto answer.
• A tile on the Facilities dashboard.
• Old links to a work order, by its old work-order number or address. They open the matching Facilities ticket.

What's different about a work order#

• Labels. Facilities says Work Order and Work Orders instead of Ticket and Tickets, everywhere you work in it: the views (All Work Orders, My Work Orders), the search box, the bulk actions (Close work orders...), the counts, and Submit a work order on an inventory item's page. If your account renamed them in Departments, you see your names instead.
• From an inventory item. Submit a work order on an item's page files the work order in Facilities, with Facilities priorities, linked to the item.
• Its own catalog. Facilities has its own statuses, priorities and types, so a work order never starts on an IT priority. The new form and the ticket offer only Facilities values.
• Schedule and cost. An open work order's Properties panel adds Scheduled start, Scheduled end, Estimated cost and Actual cost. Use them to plan the job and track what it cost.
• Moving between departments. Moving a ticket from IT to Facilities (or back) with Department in the ticket asks for a reason, re-matches its type and recalculates its SLA targets.

Who can open them#

Your plan needs schoolHelpdesk, and your account needs its Facilities department turned on. Work orders are tickets, so they use the ticket permissions, within the Facilities department:

• Work as helpdesk staff (tickets.staff) opens Helpdesk › Work orders and the Facilities inbox. Without it, people see only the requests they made.
• View tickets (tickets.view) to see work orders.
• Work tickets (tickets.update) to change them, assign them and complete them.
• Create tickets (tickets.create) to log new ones.
• Archive tickets (tickets.delete) to archive them.

On top of the permissions, you need to work in the Facilities department: be one of its members, or be a member of no department at all (then you work in IT and Facilities). Admins, and roles whose ticket reach is All tickets, work in every department. See Departments.

Which departments should someone be in?#

| Setup | What they work | Choose it when | | --- | --- | --- | | Member of Facilities only | Work orders. Tickets takes them to the Facilities inbox. | Custodians, maintenance staff and groundskeepers. | | Member of IT only | IT tickets. They don't work Facilities work orders. | Technicians and help desk staff. | | Member of both | Both inboxes, and both on My work. | Someone who really does both, like the one tech at a small campus who also handles facilities requests. | | Member of no department | IT and Facilities, wherever departments are listed, Insights included. | Avoid it for new people: add them to the department they work in instead, so their access is clear and stays right if you add departments later. |

For example, in a district where one Facilities team handles HVAC work orders for every school, add the HVAC technicians to Facilities and give their role Work as helpdesk staff, View tickets and Work tickets. They open Helpdesk › Work orders straight into the Work Orders inbox, and a request filed in Facilities, like "No heat in Room 12", lands there, with Facilities priorities and a Scheduled start to plan the visit.