Everytide: setup and user guide

What Everytide does

Everytide creates tickets on a calendar, inside Zendesk Support. Set up a schedule once (for example "the first business day of every month at 09:00") with the ticket it should create, and Everytide creates that ticket every time the schedule comes around. Use it for recurring maintenance, compliance and access reviews, audits, renewals, reports, check-ins and any routine work you want tracked as tickets.

Requirements

• Zendesk Suite (Team or higher) or Support Enterprise: Everytide stores schedules in a custom object it installs, "Everytide schedule". On Suite Team, that uses one of your three custom objects.
• The App available to your agents (see "How runs are created").

Install

1. In the Zendesk Marketplace, open Everytide and choose Install. The 14-day trial starts and Zendesk asks for a card. Billing ($120 per Zendesk account per month) starts when the trial ends unless you uninstall.
2. Leave the App available to all agents. Who can edit schedules is a separate setting: Agents can manage schedules (off by default, so only admins edit).
3. Enterprise plans with custom agent roles: give those roles view and edit access to the "Everytide schedule" object (Admin Center > Objects and rules > Custom objects > Everytide schedule > Permissions). Standard admin and agent roles already have it.

How runs are created

Everytide has no server. The App runs quietly in the background of every agent's Zendesk session and creates each run as that agent, through Zendesk's API, within a few minutes of its time.

• Many agents online at once: each run is still created once. The App checks for the run's ticket first, and Zendesk refuses to create the same run twice within two hours.
• Nobody online when a run is due (overnight, weekends, holidays): by default the run is created as soon as the first agent signs in, with an internal note saying when it was due. If several runs were missed, only the most recent is created and the note says how many were missed. Choose Skip it on a schedule to drop missed runs instead.
• An agent whose role cannot create tickets (for example a light agent) never creates runs; another agent's session does.
• Pausing a schedule stops its runs; runs that fall while it is paused are not created later.

Create a schedule

1. Open Everytide from the left navigation bar (the calendar icon) and choose New schedule.
2. When. Choose how it repeats:
   • Daily, every N days.
   • Weekly, every N weeks, on the weekdays you pick.
   • Monthly, every N months (3 for quarterly): on a day of the month (the 29th to 31st fall on the last day of shorter months), on the last day, on a weekday such as the 2nd Tuesday or the last Friday, or on a business day such as the 1st or the last.
   • Yearly, every N years, in a month, with the same day choices.
   • Hourly, every N hours between a first and last time, on the days you pick. Then the time, the time zone, the start date, and when it ends (never, on a date, or after a number of runs).
3. Business days and holidays. Choose what happens when a run lands on a closed day: run anyway, skip it, or move it to the next or previous business day. Business days come from one of your Zendesk schedules (its open days and holidays) or Monday to Friday. Holidays are copied into the schedule when you save, so after you change holidays in Zendesk, open the schedule and save it again.
4. The ticket. Subject, description (internal note or public reply), requester, group, assignee, type, priority, status, form, brand, tags and custom fields. Task tickets can be due a number of days after the run.
5. Check Next runs and Next ticket on the right, then Save schedule.

Run placeholders

Use these in the subject or description. They are filled from the run's own date, so a run created late still says the right period.

Zendesk's own {{ticket.*}} placeholders are not filled in tickets created through the API, so the editor flags them.

Manage schedules

• The list shows every schedule, its rule in plain English, the next run, the last run and its state.
• A schedule's page shows the next 10 runs and its recent tickets, and offers Run now (one extra ticket now; the schedule is unchanged), Skip next run, Pause / Resume, Edit, Duplicate and Delete (its tickets stay in Zendesk).
• If Zendesk refuses a run (for example the group was deleted), the schedule shows the reason, that run is skipped and the next runs continue. Fix the setting and save.

Find and report on the tickets

Every ticket carries the tags everytide and everytide_<schedule id> (shown on the schedule's page), and the external id everytide:<schedule>:<run time>. Use the tags in views, triggers and Explore.

Uninstall

Uninstalling stops all runs. Tickets stay. The "Everytide schedule" object and its records stay too, so reinstalling resumes your schedules; to remove them, delete the object in Admin Center > Objects and rules > Custom objects.

Data and privacy

Everytide runs only in your agents' browsers and talks only to your Zendesk account. Schedules are stored in your Zendesk account. Nothing is sent to Great Work LLC. See the privacy policy at https://greatwork.company/apps/everytide/privacy.

Support

hello@greatwork.company, reply within one business day.