Part of the Admin Training Series.
Before you configure anything, you need the vocabulary. Horizon has three concepts that show up in every conversation, every config, every troubleshooting thread: tickets, todos, and the helpdesk bridge. Get these right and the rest of the lessons land. Get them wrong and you'll spend a week confused about why a "todo" isn't on a calendar.
Problem: Your helpdesk already has tickets. What's a "ticket" in Horizon, and how is it different?
Horizon's answer: It's the same ticket. Horizon doesn't replace your helpdesk. It syncs each helpdesk ticket into its own database as a shadow record, then layers Horizon-side data on top — assignments, todos, triage results, watchlist stages, form submissions, calendar bookings.
The shadow record stays in sync with the helpdesk:
This is the helpdesk bridge. It's bi-directional. The helpdesk remains the source of truth for the customer-facing record. Horizon is the source of truth for everything Horizon adds — todos, scheduling, assignment policy decisions, triage runs.
When agents work tickets in Horizon (via the widgets — more on this below), their actions land in both systems.
Problem: A ticket says what needs to happen. It doesn't say when an agent will work on it, how long it'll take, or what slot it'll occupy in their day. Calendars don't know about tickets, and ticket lists don't know about time.
Horizon's answer: Todos. A todo is a unit of work an agent will do, tied to a ticket, that lives on a calendar and a priority queue at the same time. Todos are how Horizon connects "this ticket exists" to "this is what I'm working on right now."
There are two kinds:
| Kind | When it has a fixed time | What it represents |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled | yes — it's pinned to a specific date and time | a meeting, an onsite, a customer call, anything with a committed start |
| Floating | no — it has a rank, not a time | discretionary work that needs to happen eventually, ordered by priority |
Scheduled todos appear on the calendar at their start time. They're customer-facing in the sense that the time is committed (and often communicated to the customer).
Floating todos are ranked. They sit in a list ordered by importance and get worked when the agent has open time. Horizon's calendar can suggest where to fit floating todos based on the agent's available windows, but the time isn't pinned.
Each floating todo has a rank — one of:
Ranks let you (and dispatchers, and agents themselves) reorder priorities without rewriting times or moving things on a calendar.
Critically, ranks can override the ticket's helpdesk priority and SLA. Your helpdesk thinks ticket A is High and ticket B is Low based on its own SLA rules. If you (or a triage policy, or a dispatcher) promote ticket B and demote ticket A in Horizon, ticket B is what the agent works first — regardless of what the helpdesk thinks. Ranks are Horizon's escape hatch when the helpdesk's priority engine doesn't reflect operational reality. The helpdesk priority and SLA are still visible — they're just not the deciding signal anymore.
Both kinds of todos also have a delivery method — Onsite, Remote, or Internal — which downstream features (booking links, assignment policies) use as a filter.
You'll come back to todos when we set up scheduled todo policies and again when we configure floating todos for assignment. For now, the mental model is the important part: scheduled = pinned in time, floating = pinned in priority.
Problem: You don't want to ask agents to live in two systems. Most agents already work tickets inside the helpdesk UI. If Horizon is a separate browser tab, they'll forget about it.
Horizon's answer: Embed Horizon inside the helpdesk via two widgets.
| Widget | Where it lives | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard widget | the helpdesk's main dashboard or homepage | shows the agent's calendar, ticket tray, and current work — without leaving the helpdesk |
| Ticket widget | inside an individual ticket page | shows Horizon-side data for that ticket: todos, bookings, forms, triage history; lets agents create todos / send booking links / submit forms inline |
Behind the scenes the widgets are iframes that load the agent or dispatch panel scoped to the right context. The agent doesn't know or care — to them it just looks like Horizon is part of the helpdesk.
The widgets are how 90% of agent-side activity actually happens. Standalone Horizon (/agent, /dispatch) exists too, but most teams set the helpdesk widgets up and never look at the standalone panels.
You'll configure widget setup when we cover helpdesk integration. For now, just know they exist and that they're the primary way agents experience Horizon.
You'll hear the word lifecycle a lot. A lifecycle is what should happen as a ticket (or a form submission) moves from one state to another — new → triaged, assigned → in progress, resolved → closed, etc. Lifecycles are how you wire up the automation that fires at each step: send a notification, create a todo, run a triage policy, push a status back to the helpdesk.
Under the hood, lifecycles are powered by the workflow engine. As an admin you'll think and talk in lifecycle terms — "when a ticket is closed, do X" — and Horizon translates that into workflow runs. We'll cover this in depth in the lifecycles lesson. For now, just know the word.
Tip: When something feels wrong — "this todo didn't appear on the calendar", "this ticket didn't trigger the workflow I expected" — the first question is always "is this a scheduled todo or a floating todo?" and "is this happening in Horizon or in the helpdesk?" Most confusion in the first month traces back to mixing these up.