Migrate from Help Desk Premier to Zendesk

Help Desk Premier Tickets map to Zendesk Ticket records with status, priority, assignee, requester, and timestamps preserved. The src status values map to Zendesk status values (open, pending, hold, solved, closed). Custom Ticket Fields use a field-level mapping pass to route each field to its Zendesk typed custom field equivalent. Ticket IDs are preserved in a custom field hdp_ticket_id__c for cross-reference after migration.

Help Desk Premier Customer records map to Zendesk end-user records. Email is the dedupe key. Where Help Desk Premier uses a flat contact schema without organization linkage, we create Zendesk Users without organization_id and flag them for post-migration organization assignment by the customer's admin. Customers with duplicate emails are merged into a single Zendesk User record.

Help Desk Premier Company or organization records (where present in the specific edition) map to Zendesk Organization. Company name becomes the Organization name, and domain becomes the Organization domain field used for auto-lookup. Organization is created before User import so that organization_id is available for linking at insert time. On editions without Company records, we skip this object and create Organizations from Customer domain data during the User import pass.

Help Desk Premier Agent records carry display name, email, role, and group membership. We map Agents to Zendesk Agent records by email match. Role terminology (admin, agent, supervisor) maps to Zendesk's agent role model (light agent, agent, admin). Group memberships from Help Desk Premier map to Zendesk Group membership via the user_fields group membership array. Any Agent without a matching email in the destination goes to a reconciliation queue for the admin to provision before record import resumes.

Help Desk Premier Teams or Groups map to Zendesk Groups. Team names migrate directly. Team membership is resolved by mapping each Help Desk Premier agent's group assignment to the corresponding Zendesk Group ID. Editions that restrict team membership to one agent per team are flagged as a constraint since Zendesk Groups support multiple agents by default.

Custom fields on Help Desk Premier Tickets (picklist, text, numeric, date, boolean) map to Zendesk typed custom fields. We read the Help Desk Premier field schema via export, identify the Zendesk equivalent field type, and create the destination custom field in Zendesk before ticket import. Boolean fields from Help Desk Premier map to Zendesk checkbox or dropdown (yes/no) depending on the customer's preference. Unsupported field types are flagged in the mapping document for the admin to handle manually.

Tags from Help Desk Premier migrate to Zendesk Tags with character normalization applied during the transform pass. Zendesk strips special characters from tag names; we normalize by removing non-alphanumeric characters except hyphens and underscores, converting to lowercase. The original tag string is preserved in a mapping table for the admin to review post-migration. Tag associations to Tickets migrate as Zendesk tag array entries on each Ticket record.

Help Desk Premier Knowledge Base Articles and their category hierarchy migrate to Zendesk Help Center Sections and Articles. Article body content, section parent-child relationships, and publication status (draft, published) are preserved. The Zendesk Help Center API creates Articles under Sections within a Section Locale. We create Sections first, then Articles under the correct Section ID. Translations are not migrated unless the customer specifies a source locale target.

Help Desk Premier KB Categories map to Zendesk Help Center Sections. The category hierarchy (parent-child relationships) is preserved as nested Section records within the Zendesk Help Center. Section names and descriptions migrate directly. Section sorting order within the Help Center is preserved based on the source category display order.

Ticket conversations and internal comments from Help Desk Premier migrate to Zendesk Ticket Comments. Public and private comment distinction is preserved via the Zendesk public=true/false flag. Comment author maps to the Zendesk User record for end-user comments and the Agent record for agent comments. Comment timestamps are preserved as the Comment created_at value. The conversation thread ordering within each Ticket is maintained by the import sequence.

Ticket attachments migrate to Zendesk Ticket Attachments via the Zendesk attachment API. Files under 25 MB insert inline via the API upload endpoint. Files over 25 MB require a pre-signed URL upload pattern that we execute before creating the Ticket Comment reference. Files over 48 MB in Help Desk Premier (the export cap) are flagged in the migration report with the original file path for the admin to re-upload manually post-migration.