Freshdesk by Freshworks is an award-winning cloud-based customer service software that gives you everything you need to deliver exceptional support. It focuses on cross-functional team collaboration and its omnichannel engine streamlines customer conversations across multiple channels including email, phone, chat, and social media. Launched in 2010, Freshdesk is used today by over 150,000 companies including Honda, Pearson, UNICEF, Cisco, and Azimo. Our parent company is Freshworks Inc.

Authenticating

Freshdesk uses OAuth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Freshdesk. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Freshdesk without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Freshdesk

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Freshdesk admin to make a connection to your Freshdesk organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Freshdesk login page.

Step 2: Log in to Freshdesk

Log in to Freshdesk using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Freshdesk plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Sometimes you may need to enter an API key and a token, the step by step details of which can be found at Freshdesk. These details can also be found below in step 3. Once you have successfully logged-in, Freshdesk is going to ask you to grant access to Quolum.

Step 3: Finding API Key in Freshdesk

To find the API key in Freshdesk, follow these steps:

• Log in to your Freshdesk account.
• Click on your profile picture in the top-right corner of the screen and select "Profile settings" from the drop-down menu.
• On the left-hand side of the page, click on "API Key" under the "Integrations" section.
• If you haven't already generated an API key, click on the "Generate new key" button to create one.
• If you already have an API key, you can view it by clicking on the "Show" button next to it.

Step 4: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Freshdesk is the consent screen. On this screen, Freshdesk confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 4: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Freshdesk's website, Freshdesk is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Freshdesk Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization of projects, stories, and tasks. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.