Learn about what services are and how service management can help you.

A service is any product or project you need to support and manage through incidents, articles, change tracking and release records. Service Desk can track the development of 1 or more services. A service can be many things, such as a physical product, a website application or just a team project. Account administrators can set up and use multiple services to separate things like teams and reports, and they can also give other users and their customers access to 1 or several services. Each service has a collection of settings that can be customized to suit its needs, such as priorities, categories, and triggers.

For more information about services and service management, see Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Service Desk.

Service management, or more specifically IT Service Management, is a discipline for managing systems with a focus on the customer/user's perspective. It is a discipline that applies to systems already in production, but many of its philosophies can be borrowed and used for systems in development and non-IT related businesses. Service management covers the management of customer incidents, recurring problems, changes to a system and the managed implementation of those changes, as well as the management of your assets and infrastructure.

Service Desk allows you to track the development and use of your service(s). You might want to create different services for IT and Facilities, or it might be for employees and customers; it might even be 1 service for each of your customers if you are an IT managed service provider. Service Desk allows you to then create incidents, problems, changes, releases and knowledge articles (i.e., Service Desk records) to help track the services that you create.

Your account can be used to track any amount of items, including things like the following (each of which is represented by its own service):

• Products that are developed, built and released by your company
• Applications within a product that are developed separately
• Websites that are created and maintained by your organization
• Projects or initiatives that need to be tracked and coordinated independently
• Services or functions provided by an organization

Account administrators can create as many services for a single account as needed. Using services, administrators and agents can do the following:

• Create users (agents), groups, customers and companies that belong to the service.
• Create incidents, problems, changes and releases to track the development and maintenance of the service.
• Publish internal and external knowledge articles with support documentation.
• Post internal and external messages with info and announcements.
• Solicit customer feedback about the service (admins only).
• Enable customers to communicate with their agents and log incidents for the service using the Customer Portal (admins only).