Help Desk Alerts
Help Desk Alerts let you post your own notices, such as a planned maintenance window, a weather closure, or a heads-up about an outage, so the right people see them at the right time. An alert can appear as a banner across the top of a page, as a popup when someone arrives, or both, and it can show on your public pages, inside the admin area, or everywhere.
This is the hand-written companion to Service Health, which raises outage banners automatically. Both share the same banner area, so your own notices and automatic ones look consistent.
Where to find it
Go to Settings, open Help Desk, and select the Help Desk Alerts tab. The list shows every alert you have created, whether each is currently showing, and lets you add, edit, or remove them.
Creating an alert
Select Add Alert and fill in the details:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title | The heading, shown in bold on a banner and as the popup title. |
| Message | The body of the notice. Say what is happening, who is affected, and when you expect it resolved. |
| Alert type | Sets the color and tone: Info, Warning, or Critical. |
| Display as | Banner across the top of the page, a Popup when the person arrives, or Both. |
| Shown to | Public pages (your sign-in page and the user portal), the Admin area (your staff), or Both. |
| Show at | When the alert should start showing. Leave blank to show it as soon as you save. |
| Hide at | When it should stop. Leave blank to keep showing until you disable or delete it. |
| Enabled | Turn the alert on or off without deleting it. |
How alerts behave
- A banner stays in place while the alert is live. A popup can be dismissed, and once a visitor dismisses it, it stays dismissed for them.
- Show at and Hide at give each alert its own schedule, so you can set up a maintenance notice in advance and let it appear and disappear on its own.
- Choosing Public pages shows the alert to everyone who visits your portal, which is the quickest way to cut down on duplicate tickets during a known issue. Many schools keep routine notices to the admin area and reach for a public banner only when it matters.
The clearest alerts name the affected service, say what to expect, and give a time. "Student WiFi is down in the Main building. Our team is working on it and expects it back by 2pm." beats a vague "We are experiencing technical difficulties."