Migrate from House-on-the-Hill Service Desk to Zendesk

House-on-the-Hill Contact records map to Zendesk end-user User records. The email address becomes the primary identifier and dedupe key. We use the Users API POST /users endpoint. If the source uses a flat contact model without a separate organization reference, we create the User and optionally attach it to a migrated Organization record via the organization_id field. External IDs from House-on-the-Hill are preserved in the user_id field on the Zendesk User for cross-reference.

House-on-the-Hill Company records map to Zendesk Organization. The company domain and name map to domain and name fields. Organization records must be created before Users that reference them via organization_id, so this is the second table in the dependency sequence after Contacts. We extract organization_id from the House-on-the-Hill contact export where a contact-to-company relationship is present and resolve it to the migrated Zendesk Organization ID.

House-on-the-Hill Agent records map to Zendesk User accounts with the agent role. The HTTPS Report API does not expose agent records for automated export; we extract agent data from the UI CSV export where available and use the Users API to provision them in Zendesk with verified: false until the agent confirms their account. Agents without an email in the source export are flagged for manual provisioning by the customer's admin.

House-on-the-Hill Ticket records map directly to Zendesk Ticket. We map status (Open, Closed, Pending) to Zendesk ticket_status values, priority to priority, and subject to subject. The requester_id and assignee_id are resolved by matching the House-on-the-Hill contact and agent IDs against the migrated User records before each ticket batch is submitted. Ticket reference numbers from the source are preserved in the Zendesk ticket's tags or a custom field for audit. If the source stores requester email directly on the ticket rather than a contact ID, we create the User inline during ticket import.

Ticket conversation threads from House-on-the-Hill's related table map to Zendesk Comment records on the parent Ticket. We identify public replies versus internal notes from a type flag in the conversation export and set the public field accordingly. Comments are imported after the parent Ticket has been confirmed with a Zendesk ID, using the Ticket Comments API with the parent ticket ID resolved from the House-on-the-Hill ticket reference map. The conversation timestamp maps to Zendesk Comment created_at.

House-on-the-Hill KB articles map to Zendesk Guide Articles. We export article title, body, author, category assignment, and any custom article fields, then create the target Section and Category hierarchy in Zendesk Guide before article import. Articles are created via the Help Center API POST /help_center/categories/{category_id}/sections/{section_id}/articles. If the source author is an agent, we map the author to a Zendesk User; if anonymous, the article is created without an author association.

House-on-the-Hill file attachments are stored in the document management area and linked to tickets by an internal document ID. The ticket CSV does not embed attachment binary data. We export the attachment records as a separate pass, download the file binaries, and upload them to Zendesk via the Attachments API using multipart form encoding. We re-link each attachment to the migrated Zendesk ticket using the ticket ID map created during the ticket import phase. Attachments exceeding the Zendesk API size limit are flagged for manual re-upload by the customer's admin.

House-on-the-Hill custom ticket and contact fields defined in the form designer require pre-creation in Zendesk before data import. We inspect the field schema via the CSV export template, map each custom field name to a Zendesk field of equivalent type (text, dropdown, checkbox, integer, date), and create the Zendesk custom field via the Ticket Fields API before any ticket data is loaded. Dropdown options are migrated as a comma-separated string split into Zendesk tag values or as a custom ticket field with the option list created in Zendesk first.

House-on-the-Hill SLA policies and their ticket associations are not independently exportable. We extract SLA name, breach time, and any SLA assignment from the ticket export where present, and document the full SLA definition for recreation in Zendesk SLA Centre. SLA metric (first response, next response, resolution time) and target values map to Zendesk SLA Policy conditions and targets. Ticket-level SLA assignment at import time is preserved as a custom field or documented in the handoff notes if the customer's Zendesk tier supports SLA Centre.

House-on-the-Hill tags are a flat label system stored as a comma-separated string per ticket. We split them into individual tag values at migration time and apply them to the Zendesk Ticket via the Tags API or as a tag array in the ticket payload. Tags used for categorization in House-on-the-Hill that do not map cleanly to Zendesk's tag model are documented in the handoff notes with a recommendation to use Zendesk Views or SLAs for equivalent filtering.