The helpdesk module will be noted “HD” for ease of writing.

• a USER is a person experiencing issues and requesting help from the helpdesk
• a CUSTOMER is a person or entity owning a CONTRACT to access the helpdesk
• a TECH is a person working on the helpdesk to solve USERs' problems
• an ATTENDANT is a person taking calls over the phone and allocating TICKETs to USERs
• a CONTRACT is the set of terms under which a CUSTOMER has access to the helpdesk, and its current state vector
• a TICKET is the initial entry point for an issue opened by a USER
• a FOLLOWUP represents additional action on a TICKET after it has been created.

In most setups, it is expected that the ATTENDANT role will be filled by either the USERs themselves or the TECHs processing a phone call for hotline environments. This means this business-level entity has no code-level implementation.

HD makes use of two taxonomies:

• HD Status : a list of the statuses defined by the HD site admin. HD only requirement is that the first value defined in the taxonomy represents the state a ticket is in where the issue no longer needs anything done.
• HD Severity : a list of the severity levels defined by the HD site admin. HD makes no use of this.

HD tickets can link to an e-commerce transaction, allowing for faster resource allocation decisions on tickets submitted without a support contract, and for code-based generation of contract by the e-commerce module, which could be useful for the automatic setup of warranty HD access.