A customer service desk for Azure DevOps.
BoardwalkDesk gives your customers a simple web portal to raise and follow support tickets, while your team keeps working them as work items in Azure Boards. No Azure DevOps accounts for your customers, no second tool for your agents.
Hosted at boardwalkdesk.com. The 14-day trial needs no card. Sign in with the Microsoft work account you use for Azure DevOps, connect a project and your desk is ready.
Azure Boards is great for your team. It was never meant for your customers.
Your developers and support people already live in Azure DevOps. But a customer cannot raise a work item without an Azure DevOps account, and you do not want them browsing your backlog, your area paths or your internal comments. So requests arrive by email, get copied into a work item by hand, and the customer never hears back until someone remembers.
Many help desk tools fix that by moving support out of Azure DevOps into another system, with a sync between the two. BoardwalkDesk keeps everything in Azure Boards and adds only the part that was missing: a safe front door for your customers.
A help desk for Azure DevOps teams
Your customers get a portal. Your agents keep the tool they already use.
Sign in with an emailed code
Customers sign in with a one-time code sent to their email. No passwords to forget and no Azure DevOps licence to buy for them.
Tickets are work items
Every ticket is a work item in your own Azure DevOps project, tagged so you can query it, put it on a board and link it to the fix.
Any process
Works with Agile, Scrum, Basic, CMMI and inherited processes. No custom fields to add, so your process stays as it is.
Customers stay informed
When a ticket changes status or an agent adds a reply, the customer gets an email with a link back to the ticket.
Customers see only their own
A customer sees the tickets they raised. Optionally, colleagues from the same company domain can see each other's tickets.
Internal notes stay internal
Start a comment with [internal] and the customer never sees it. Agent replies show as "Support team", never an agent's name or email.
Nothing else leaks
Assignees, area and iteration paths, other fields and links into Azure DevOps are never sent to the customer's browser.
Attachments with care
Customers can attach files. Files your agents add stay private until a desk admin chooses to share them.
Set up a desk in minutes
Three steps, and your customers have a portal.
Sign in with Microsoft
Use the work account that you use for Azure DevOps and approve the connection to your organization.
Create a desk
Give it a name and an address, then choose the project and the work item type that tickets should become.
Share the link
Send your customers the desk's address. Their tickets appear in Azure Boards, and their replies come back to them.
Plans
Priced per desk by the number of customers who use it. Your agents never cost extra. Pay yearly and get 12 months for the price of 10.
Starter
$29 per month
or $290 per year
Up to 100 customers per desk
Team
$79 per month
or $790 per year
Up to 1,000 customers per desk
Business
$199 per month
or $1,990 per year
Unlimited customers per desk
Prices in US dollars, per desk. Every new desk starts with a 14-day free trial with no card and no customer limit. You choose a plan for a desk inside BoardwalkDesk, so the subscription is always tied to the desk it pays for.
Questions
Short answers to the things people ask first.
Do my customers need an Azure DevOps account?
No. Customers open your desk's web address, enter their email and sign in with a one-time code that we email to them. They never see Azure DevOps and need no licence or password.
Where are the tickets stored?
In your own Azure DevOps project, as ordinary work items of the type you choose. BoardwalkDesk keeps the records it needs to run the portal, such as which desk owns which work item, visibility settings, your customers' email addresses, sign-in and notification records, and the connection to your organization; the tickets themselves stay in Azure DevOps.
Do I have to change my process or add custom fields?
No. BoardwalkDesk works with Agile, Scrum, Basic, CMMI and inherited processes and adds no custom fields. Tickets get the tags BoardwalkDesk and BoardwalkDesk:<desk>, so you can find them with a query or show them on a board.
Can customers see other people's tickets?
Not by default: a customer sees only the tickets they raised. You can let colleagues with the same company email domain see each other's tickets (never for public domains such as gmail.com), and a single ticket can be marked private so only its author sees it.
How do I keep a comment from the customer?
Start it with [internal] in Azure DevOps and it is never shown in the portal. You can also hide a comment from the desk's team area. Agent replies appear as "Support team", without the agent's name or email.
Which Azure DevOps organizations are supported?
Organizations connected to Microsoft Entra ID (a work or school account). Organizations backed only by personal Microsoft accounts are not supported yet.
Do I need to be a project administrator?
It helps. BoardwalkDesk creates service hooks so changes reach customers right away, which needs permission to edit subscriptions in the project. Without it, the desk still works and checks for changes every two minutes instead.
Can customers raise tickets by email?
Not yet. Today customers raise and reply to tickets in the portal; the emails they receive link straight to the ticket.
How does pricing work?
Each desk has its own plan, priced by how many customers use it: Starter up to 100 for $29 a month, Team up to 1,000 for $79 a month and Business with no limit for $199 a month. A year costs the same as 10 months. Agents are free on every plan.
What happens when the trial ends?
A desk without a plan stops accepting new tickets; existing tickets stay readable. Choose a plan for the desk inside BoardwalkDesk to keep going.
What if a desk reaches its plan's customer limit?
New customers cannot sign up to that desk until you move it to a larger plan. Customers who already use it keep working.
Also from Solutions Group Unlimited for Azure DevOps teams: Switchyard for .NET, what a NuGet package change touches and GitRepoWatcher, alerts for unpushed Git work. All products and pricing are on Products & Services.
Give your customers a front door to Azure Boards.
Connect a project, share the link, and keep working where you already work.
No card needed for the trial. See BoardwalkDesk's privacy policy and terms.