[3][4] The initiative was created by Zendesk in June 2011 in collaboration with eight other founding member organizations including Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Tracker, ServiceNow and SugarCRM.

[10][11][12] Support tools are generally built around a common paradigm that begins with a customer making a request or an incident report, these create a ticket.

[13][14] For systems with the Networked Help Desk API implemented, it is possible for several different applications related to a customer's support experience to synchronize data in one uniquely identified shared ticket.

[15] While many applications in these domains have implemented APIs that allow data to be imported, exported and modified, Network Help Desk provide a common standard for customer support information to automatically synchronize between several systems.

[16] The standard allows for "full delegation" (analysts in both systems each make public and private comments and synchronize status) as well as "partial delegation" where the instance receiving the ticket can only make private comments and status changes are not synchronized.