An item’s Lifecycle Status in OneDesk is a configurable Status for an item which denotes the current progress of the item. OneDesk provides a selection of pre-created Lifecycle Statuses for Tickets, Tasks, and Projects. These each have different Statuses that are available to you when you sign up for OneDesk. See examples of these Statuses below. Learn more about the differences between item types here and Project types here.

It is possible to change the default Lifecycle Statuses of a Ticket, Task, or Project in OneDesk to match what works best for you and your business. Customization settings include renaming Statuses, adding new Statuses or removing existing Statuses, changing the Status color, changing the associated Lifecycle State, and more.

Lifecycle Status vs. Lifecycle State

The Lifecycle Status can have any name you wish to give it. The three available States encompass all Lifecycle Statuses, such as whether an item is new and has not been addressed yet (Not Started), is currently being worked on (In Progress), or has been completed (Finished). 

OneDesk offers you the ability to create and name several Lifecycle Statuses for your items, so you can have a variety of use cases for these three main States. For example, a Ticket that is Finished can be “Resolved,” but in other cases it might be better to name it “Closed” or the name could have other indicators specific to your company and workflow as well. You can have multiple Statuses under each of these three States.

How to Customize Lifecycle Statuses

To change aspects of an item’s Lifecycle Status in OneDesk, you can click “Configure Statuses” from the Lifecycle Status drop-down when inside an item. You can also go to More applications -> Administration -> Tickets, Tasks, or Projects, depending on the application whose Status you wish to edit.

For example, let’s edit the Statuses that appear for a specific type of Ticket, so we will select the default type “Tickets” from the list:

Next, select “Manage Statuses” under “Statuses” for our Tickets.

Here, you can click on the Status name and color to change them.

You can also set the State to “Not Started”, “In Progress”, or “Finished.” 

Additionally, you can add new Lifecycle Statuses, drag and drop Statuses to change the order in which they appear on new items, set a Status as the default when an item is created, and delete existing Statuses.

The optional “Prompt to Complete” drop-down offers you the ability to require a user to complete a specific field or action before changing the Lifecycle Status. You can read more about this option here.

Let’s create a new Lifecycle Status for our Tickets.

Creating a New Lifecycle Status

First, type the name of the new Lifecycle Status you’d like to add, like below:

Hit Enter after typing the name, and choose the color and State. You can optionally select the Prompt to Complete, if you wish. Then you can close the window and your new Lifecycle Status will be saved. See the workflow below.

Once you close the window, this new Lifecycle Status will be available on all Tickets.

You can also rename, add, change the order of, delete and set the State and default for Project Lifecycle Statuses (also found in Administration -> User Apps -> Projects), but there is no Prompt to Complete as Projects are containers, not items to be acted upon.

Note on Statuses and States: 

If you have multiple Lifecycle Statuses with the same Lifecycle State, the Status that was initially set to that State will be the default Status set whenever an item’s Lifecycle State is set through automation or other method.

You can create a custom view that filters by Lifecycle Status or by Lifecycle State, as in the examples below. For example, if we filter by “Open” Status, only Tickets with that Lifecycle Status will show up. If we filter by Lifecycle State of “In Progress”, though, all Tickets with Statuses set to that State such as “Open”, “Pending customer”, and “Pending agent” will show up. This allows you to create a wide variety of custom views and filters, based on Status or State.