Having a multi-talented, cross-functional team is often seen as an ideal team composition, opening up many different opportunities for work and services that a company can offer. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no challenges presented by this situation. In fact, by providing various different services, there are often multiple workflows introduced to support each one. This can be tricky to manage, and sometimes this administrative headache can become more onerous than the work itself.

Under the Appearance tab in your OneDesk Email Settings, you are able to edit some visual aspects of your email messages. If you have completed the Getting Started Wizard in OneDesk, you would have already edited aspects of the header (the logo) and added a signature. The email header and signature you set will be what OneDesk uses to wrap all your emails in. We put these at the top (header) and bottom (signature) of every email from OneDesk.

OneDesk has built a sophisticated messaging system that ensures you never have to worry about where the recipient of your message is. Thanks to this powerful messaging system, you don’t need to be concerned if your recipient is using live chat, email, or the customer portal to message you. OneDesk funnels the messages to the appropriate channel and will ensure your recipient gets the messages intended for them in whatever channel they are using.

OneDesk allows you to create items such as tickets and tasks by adding them manually. Usually, you will need to fill out the internal creation form for that given item. However, inserting an item allows you to bypass filling out the form and to insert items with the inline item insertion function. This function lets you add multiple items into a given location quickly by providing the minimum amount of information needed, usually just an item name. You can use inline inserting to add any item types.

OneDesk uses different naming conventions to refer to the things inside of OneDesk. There are a few main objects that OneDesk can contain: portfolios, folders, projects, and items. However, you can ONLY share projects and items, not portfolios and folders. Portfolios and folders create structure. Portfolios group projects while folders group items. Projects group folders and items together.

A lot of companies, and their underlying departments, face growing pains as they build on their success and establish themselves as true organizations. As product offerings and capabilities expand, departments and teams start to field wider ranges of requests for work, and this can lead to people specializing in order to build efficiency. Sometimes these requests can come from other teams at the same company even.

When a company first starts out, the team is often cross-functional in its nature. This overlapping of responsibilities allows a company to be scrappy and grow quickly without too much overhead. Over time and through this period of growth, companies start to expand and develop more definition in terms of its different internal functions: sales, marketing, customer experience, operations, finances, and more.

On Saturday Feb 27th, OneDesk released the February 2021 update to OneDesk with many new features and improvements.