About Trainor HelpDesk

The Trainor HelpDesk is provided for the use of the current, prospective and past students of Kevin Trainor as the preferred means of contacting Kevin and the Teaching Assistants who are helping him.

The Trainor HelpDesk is an issue tracking system like those used by most tech support and customer service teams. This system is separate from other similar systems in use at the University. It's purposes are:

• To help students in Kevin's current courses get quick and effective assistance.
• To help prospective students communicate with Kevin regarding future courses.
• To help past students keep in touch with Kevin and ask for his help in writing letters of recommendation.

Requests from students in this system are known as tickets. Students can create a ticket just by sending an email. Files can be uploaded to tickets by attaching them to the email that generates the ticket. More details on how to compose and send an email that will create your ticket are provided in other sections of this User Guide.

Tickets persist in the HelpDesk system until your question is answered or problem solved. During this period, you will correspond with our team of helpers by adding comments to the ticket and reading comments that we have added. You can do this commenting using email. Just reply to the emails that you receive from the system. Alternatively, you can click on a link provided in the email and interact with your ticket using our Web application. This back and forth interaction continues until we close the ticket.

Tickets are grouped into queues to assure that the team of people working on your ticket knows how to answer your question or solve your problem. A separate queue has been created for each course. A few other queues have been created for other things like recommendation requests. Getting your ticket in the correct queue is achieved by you sending your email to the correct email address.

If you are currently a student in one of Kevin's courses, the correct email address to which to send your request email is documented in the course syllabus and on the Canvas site for the course. For those of you who can't find that address, and for those of you who are not in a current course, we have created a job aid to help you find the proper email address. To get started using the Trainor HelpDesk, proceed to Start Here!