SLAs that respect business hours: running a service desk inside Microsoft 365
A response target of “four hours” means little if the clock keeps running overnight. How Brillienta Helpdesk counts SLA time, pauses it, and escalates once.
Brillienta team·Published ·5 min readMany teams run IT, HR or facilities support from a shared inbox, with response times tracked — if at all — in a spreadsheet. Brillienta Helpdesk replaces that with a portal and agent workspace inside SharePoint and Teams. One of the details that matters most is how it measures time.
Targets in business minutes
Each priority has a first-response target and a resolution target, measured in business minutes. Time only counts inside business hours in the helpdesk's time zone — evenings, weekends and holidays are skipped, and daylight-saving changes are handled. One-off and yearly holidays are configured in the admin pages (holidays are part of the Pro plan).
The clock pauses when it should
- While a ticket is waiting for the customer, the SLA clock pauses.
- When a category needs approval — by a named person or the requester's manager — the SLA starts only once the request is approved.
No server, no duplicate alerts
SLA checks, reminder planning and queue processing run in the browser of an agent who has the helpdesk open, with shared locks so two browsers never do the same work twice. Each ticket records its escalation level, so an alert is never sent twice. When nobody is online, a reminder flow in Power Automate delivers reminders instead.
Email without giving the app your mailbox
The Helpdesk never sends email itself. Every email is one row in an Outbox list, sent once by your own Power Automate flow from your support mailbox — and duplicates within ten minutes are rejected.