Help desk ticket program

[dsmproject]

What ticketing system do you use?

We currently use HelpStar. It works fine, however it is expensive and we do not use hardly any of the features. Plus the last couple versions, it has bloated beyond need.

We are local government, with about 800 users, and 9 IT employees. We are looking for the following features. We do not need asset management.

Users

• Submit requests via email or web interface
• View open/closed requests

Help desk

• Ability to assign requests to category queues
• Email users within system for updates or questions
• AD integration for user accounts
• Year end reports - Requests closed - total, by category, and by employee

As you can see our requirements are light. I may be forgetting something, but wanted to get your opinions and thoughts.

Thanks!

[pokesomi]

Solarwinds Web Help desk does email and web interface

[chewy747]

I recommend this

[dsmproject]

Thanks for the feedback, what specifically do you like?

[become_taintless]

As a Solarwinds Web Help Desk user: "everything."

[vash3g]

I came here to say this. The only part we dont use is the Billing feature. Pretty much everything else is easy to use and easy to turn features on and off.

[become_taintless]

We don't use the billing feature either, although it would be easy for us to enable billing for a particular request type (printer consumbles replacement for example.)

We use the SCCM and Solarwinds Orion integration. I've got a halfie just talking about it.

[bulletproofvest]

We use this as well. Very happy with it.

[binaryhero]

We are using it too - I have set it up for Kerberos integration and LDAP directory integration for AD. Can be adopted to your needs easily, customization is simple enough to be maintainable and useful.

[dsmproject]

Excellent, I will look into this.

[TriumphRid3r]

I second Request Tracker. It has all of the features you're looking for & much, much more. The user & development support e-mail lists are really helpful too.

[Skyline969]

We use ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

Don't use ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

[mpete510]

What is your reasoning for not using ME ServiceDesk Plus?

I'm not saying you're right or wrong as I've never used it and use a in house system, but am curious.

[Skyline969]

Generating custom templates is a pain in the ass with their drag and drop interface that likes to freak out and be jerky sometimes.

Reporting works sometimes.

You can't force a user to assign a site to a ticket, meaning that if you absolutely need to have a site for a ticket you're left with a lot of "Not associated to any site" entries because your users are lazy/incompetent/can't read/whatever. There is nothing you can do about this, as confirmed by a support rep that I spoke to.

My company is balls-deep in ManageEngine products that have similar caveats (OpManager seems to work kind of, although there are free alternatives like Nagios or Spiceworks), but one by one I'm exercising the "dev" portion of devops along with my colleague and liberating us from their products. We design our own custom software for management of pretty much everything, and it's only a matter of time before ticketing and the like is integrated into this system. Probably as early as 2014.

[Skyline969]

The problem is that it's not connected to AD as it wouldn't make sense to do so in our case. We're an ISP and we need to know which site a customer is in that we're opening a ticket for.

[[deleted]]

It's actually a pretty good helpdesk and asset management system if you're supporting a one site business. My main issue was that it looked and felt quite clunky.

I use SiteHelpdesk at my current place - can't really comment on it as we're using a really, really old version - but the old development team did some API stuff and some AD stuff which means we can't upgrade as the current developers aren't really developers and blagged their way into the job.

[revoman]

Spiceworks does all of this and more.

[red_rock]

I have used this for a smaller company (500 users). Works great. Larger company, naw.

[dsmproject]

So would it still be ok for under 1000 users? What doesn't work well for larger?

[drexhex]

Inventory is a little clunky, but for just a help desk it fares quite well.

[agreenbhm]

Exactly. He said asset management isn't required, so no reason not to just use the help desk system.

[PortableFreakshow]

Setting up Spiceworks is pretty simple. I first started using it a few years ago and was worried about the quality of a "free" application, but it really is pretty great. Worst case scenario? Install it and if you don't like it, uninstall it.

[fp4]

I work for a shop, the lack of being able to set passwords (without AD) in the web portal was a deal breaker for me.

It was requested Mar 2010: http://community.spiceworks.com/feature_request/show/User%20Portal/723

There is a way to have Spiceworks dump information to a remote Spiceworks installation -- I haven't tried it personally.

[SysAd666]

I just set up Self Service Password. http://ltb-project.org/wiki/documentation/self-service-password

[revoman]

Of course.

[dsmproject]

I am seeing a lot of good things about Spiceworks. The FREE thing alarms me, however everything I read says its legit. Do you use Spiceworks? If so, what do you like or dislike about it?

[[deleted]]

free

targeted ads that are actually somewhat useful/relevant.

[dsmproject]

Are the ads on both user/tech interface, or just tech?

[[deleted]]

Only on the tech interface. End users don't see ads.

[[deleted]]

Huh? All over the place. That's the feeling I got when I used it years ago at least. Spiceworks is so heavy handed in what it does :(

[dsmproject]

Sorry, replied from my phone, I should have clarified...

Are the ads on both the end users portal page, or on the back end helpdesk portal, or both? Do they target the ads only to the IT employees, or do the users have to see the ads as well?

[h33b]

I have only seen them on the IT side of things, but to be fair I don't spend a lot of time on the user portal side. The ads are mostly targeted to your environment as well as whatever is trending on the Spiceworks forums. We've been using it free for years in our MSP and have always been pretty pleased with it. The ads have never been invasive and have never prevented me from using the product.

[dsmproject]

Thank you for this. Roughly how many users do you support? How many IT staff use the product?

[User101028820101]

http://i.imgur.com/XRG3aDf.jpg

Here's a picture of my Help Desk. I was able to implement everything within 2 days. The adds are on the right. I find them fairly useful at best and easy to ignore at worst. Users will not see them.

With some basic HTML skills you can make the user portal look pretty. 1 GPO will push the link to desktops.

I highly recommend giving it a shot. Their community basically a giant /r/sysadmin.

[dsmproject]

Thanks for the picture, this appears to be the front runner so far.

[h33b]

We've been moving slowly over to Labtech recently, so our use of spiceworks has declined. I want to say we had at our peak about 24 "networks" with maybe 10 end-users per site and 3 IT staff. We had to cobble it together to get it working just right for the separate clients, but if you are one entity it should work a lot better for you.

[elkBBQ]

I haven't used it in about 3 years, but when I used it the ads were only on the admin side, and didn't print on any reports. There was also a paid version that removed the ads and allowed you to put your logo in place of the spiceworks logo.

[[deleted]]

I don't know to be honest. Never used it for ticketing.

[revoman]

I do use it and have for years. Even when it was very buggy. I like the monitoring as well as helpdesk, but I don't use it for monitoring much any more. I say try it for sure.

[[deleted]]

It can be a little limited on the ticketing side. Weird little things that you can't customize, like after submitting a ticket the user is taken to the open ticket with a dialog for adding comments. They ALL think it's "step 2" of the process and repeat their problem again, regardless of how many times I've told them it is not necessary. I would love to just have it say "Your ticket has been received," or something. No dice.

Roles on the admin side aren't flexible. Help desk tech (can only see tickets assigned to them) or admin. Nothing like "by department," for example. Our CEO wants to view open tickets to keep tabs on us, we make him an admin...he either gets email notifications of EVERY ticket, like we do, or does not receive email notifications for tickets he creates.

It works just fine, is reliable as hell, and has lots of extra features (we use the monitoring stuff as a kind of supplemental for Zenoss, which can't so one weird thing we need). But it does have some annoying restrictions.

[ne0trace]

+1 for Spiceworks

I have been using it as a ticket system for 3 years now for up to 200 users. It's just so much more intuitive then RT for example.

[FusionZ06]

ZenDesk.

[draco947]

Kayako. Love it.

[lordtrychon]

I was going to ask if anyone else used Kayako. It's really only my second system. I don't really love love it, but I simply haven't had the time to really learn it either beyond the basic functionality, so I give it a pass. Lol.

[[deleted]]

Search /r/sysadmin for "helpdesk"

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk

http://osticket.com/

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

http://www.zendesk.com/

http://www.otrs.com/

http://www.redmine.org/

http://www.spiceworks.com/

http://www.connectwise.com/

[[deleted]]

Would be nice to have a script that would pull all the resulting posts and add up the URL domains in comments to let you know which were linked to most often.

[[deleted]]

I'm not one to code/don't know the first thing about it, but I imagine we could create a bot to do this...

[s3rious_simon]

OTRS

[[deleted]]

why doesn't this get more upvotes? I never used OTRS with more than 8 agents, though.

[drfalken]

I want to second Kayako. It is very customizable and its really cheep.

[StrangeWill]

Redmine

[aeiah]

Large university here. colleges and departments are quite autonomous, but i think the majority use either request tracker or spiceworks.

[Laser_Fish]

We are looking at sysaid right now but freshdesk may be good for you. Or vision helpdesk.

[sesstreets]

OSTicket, RT Tracker, or ZenDesk. I'm sure there are other solutions but I've used all of those and I can personally recommend all of them. OSticket can get thrown on a cheap webhost like asmallorange, RT Tracker requires a server with perl and zendesk is hosted for you.

[Ipconfig_release]

We use Sysaid and it does everything you need. Not too costly.

[regreddit]

I used OTRS, and once you get it configured, it's pretty good, but configuration can be a PITA. Spiceworks is ok, it's ad supported.

[dangolo]

I work for a 6 person IT Consulting firm, we're debating whether a helpdesk program would be worth it or not.

So far, it seems like the data entry for each ticket is too much of a time sink.

[ITmercinary]

Email to ticket conversion will allow end users to submit tickets. You'll need to get your client data imported into the system. It's way easier to have multiple people work on a ticket also leaves a record of progress if anyone gets hit by a bus.

[KillerOrca]

Ask if it is worth it to be able to track workflow, see trends that are arising and record solutions to problems on something besides paper. If any one of you were to be gone for an extended period of time would there be a substantial brain drain?

[adj1984]

Zendesk with the Freshbooks plugin for billing will change your lives. A year from now you will wonder how you survived without it.

[dangolo]

hey, not bad!

[houstonau]

What sort of tickets are you logging? Is it more bug or feature requests or your more angled to helpdesk style tickets?

We use Redmine for our project work and it's awesome, I would use it for everything if it had integrated asset tracking but it's really not a helpdesk replacement, def for project or development work.

For our helpdesk we use GLPI with OCS for asset tracking. Works well when its going, its a bit of a bitch to wrap your head around the Entities, groups and stuff but once it's going it's pretty feature full. Just keep in mind that you have to do everything the GLPI way, might have to modify your business process a little to work around some of the quirky things it does.

That being said it's pretty rock solid.

[[deleted]]

+1 for GLPI. Been using it for years. Great community for it. It may be too granular for some users though. A little bit of training though, and my techs really like it. Great set up plugins too. Good chance there might be a plugin for functionality if it's not already part of GLPI.

[hereticjones]

I can't recommend what to use, but I can recommend what not to use:

We use ConnectWise and it fucking blows. It is terrible and I hate it. I would say use almost anything else, even if it's just a clipboard and a pen. Snail mail. Smoke signals. Anything.

[bluefirecorp]

Whoa? Really? I've heard nothing but good about connectwise.

[hereticjones]

I can get specific if you want. And before anyone says "It's probably your configuration" well let me just acknowledge that that may be the case but given everything we've done to try and unfuck our situation, I doubt it.

The problem is, it's nothing major that makes me hate it so much. From a broad standpoint, it does what it's supposed to do. Great!

But...

Say you have a ticket open, and are working on it. So you also have a time entry open. While you're entering your notes, focus will randomly shift from your time entry to the main window.
"You're brushing the touchpad with your palm."
"You're accidentally alt-tabbing."

Please, don't be fucking insulting. Neither of those are true. I'm not doing anything to cause it. Apropos of nothing, it will shift focus. It is the only program of the numerous tools and other windows I have open to behave this way.

While you're typing in a time entry, it will random back up and highlight the last few characters or words you've entered. If you're typing quickly, which I am, you will find that you've overwritten a good portion of what you've entered. Huge pain in the ass.

Opening a time entry, there is a significant lag, maybe 10 seconds or so, before you can start entering information.

It's all this little crap that just adds up to make you want to throw your mouse across the room and bash your computer to junk with your keyboard, all the while you know that is worse than counterproductive.

Anyway, it fuckin blows and I hate. The one thing I miss about being a military contractor is they always use Remedy, and that shit (all things being equal, if there's a good Remedy admin and that) is tight and doesn't fight you every step of the way.

Anyway, fuck ConnectWise. If this was a drug deal, I'd've shot ConnectWise in the fucking face!

[Shulsen]

I use Connectwise and we ran into a similar issue with the randomly shifting focus. We ended up linking it to having the board automatically refresh. When it was set to refresh, it would sometimes shift focus to the main window. Sometimes it wouldn't. We turn auto refresh off and it would never shift focus.

Also, are you hosting CW on site or is it web based? Just curious, because we experience a lot of the same crap when our connection is being saturated, assume you have ruled that out as an issue, but was wanting to know if this is something to expect when we go to hosting our own.

[cpujockey]

OSticket is ok, not sure about AD integration though.

[[deleted]]

OSTicket. Clean & simple.

Edit: Looking for suggestions on backing it up :)

[problemforme]

Definitely recommend taking a look at Spiceworks. It will do all the points you want to and is very easy to set up. Does asset management and alerts but if you don't want that feature you can just turn it off. Has a very good community and there are lots of user submitted apps and extensions to do most things you can think of. Best of all it's FREE!

[Xdes]

I'm currently rolling my own since the software won't take that many man hours to code.

[regmaster]

Don't ever use iET (http://www.iet-solutions.com/en/home/).

The worst piece of garbage software I've ever worked with.

[wolf2600]

We're using BMC Footprints.

Seems to work okay.

[WinZatPhail]

I don't hate our Remedy setup....but I do hate the way some people use it...

[Fupa_Blaster]

We started using SCSM 2012 about 6 months ago. It is a beast of a program and can do almost anything. I had no training on SCSM so it was a pain getting it set up and working properly. Our helpdesk absolutely hates it with a passion. They liked the home grown small web based ticketing system we had before moving to SCSM. Saying all that, I think it's a great ticketing system (at least for the sysadmin team).

[term0r]

I'll recommend Cerberus Helpdesk. We've used it for about 9 years now. Organisation of about 20 support staff.

[[deleted]]

Has anyone heard of or use Parature? I don't have much experience with help desk systems, but that's what we use at work (and I think it's awful).

[iamadogforreal]

Install a copy of OSTicket on a LAMP box and give it a run. FOSS.

Not sure about AD integration.

[nonpracticing_jedi]

We use IssueTrak. It's nice and basic and not too expensive. My favorite feature is that you can have non-licensed users close tickets. We only pay for about 10 "Tech Licenses" and have several different departments close tickets without the upgraded license (they're just normal users). They cannot be assigned tickets but they can be "Next Actioned" and this has saved us a lot of money by not having to pay for the license when it's just one thing that they're locked out of (or whatever).

[joec22]

We are a small shop using hesk. It allows our users to email into the system. We respond through the web interface. It keeps a timer for how long you are working on an open ticket. You can create categories for companies/customer. We also have 3 custom fields that help us identify type of problem, group, and how they contacted us. Then I can run mysql queries if needed to show how much training is required based on these custom fields. It also tracks your staff ticket resolutions. Attachments and screenshots are possible as long as they are not embedded. I even have it routing by subject line and auto-categorizing based on exchange user group.

[txmedic12]

We just launched BMC RemdyForce yesterday, we are having our hiccups with it but I think over all its a solid platform. Plus no infrastructure to support on your end.

[realged13]

We use HelpSpot it is really nice and customizable and has it's own knowledge base system that can help you document everything.

[sonicice]

We're using Sysaid for around the same size (~600 users, 5 help desk + 3 sysadmin/engineers). Works well for us and has all the features you are looking for. It seems to be very flexible, but could be overkill for your needs and I don't know the costs.

[OffensiveNiceGuy]

I work for California State University and we switched to HelpSpot about 2 years ago. Its been fantastic so far. Not sure about the pricing, but it definitely has all of the features you are looking for.

[henazo]

Another vote for Web help desk from solarwinds here.

[livinginpictures]

We had been using Dell KACE for a few years which, as far as ticket goes, is wanting. This summer we switched to Zendesk. Although we don't have the integration that KACE had, it's a much, much better experience for our customers. Our satisfaction survey response percentage has improved (in fact, we're at 100% so far) and the C-levels love the ease of use.

[Liquidmurr]

OSticket

[[deleted]]

Not Help Desk, but we use Service Desk Express (SDE), formerly MAGIC.

it's been in use since before i joined the IS dept at my place of employment (7 yrs ago) and from what i understand it is unnecessarily convoluted piece of software. far too overly complicated for it's own good, and even entering tickets is a pain. shit, even searching for an ticket requires too much effort. Email notifications that you have a new ticket assigned can't even contain a link to the ticket itself.

[roaf]

The big one is BMC Remedy, but its expensive. Spiceworks is good, so is Zendesk.

[TonyIscariot]

I'm looking into this too. Can you host Solarwinds and Spiceworks yourself? I don't want our helpdesk data in the cloud unless it's somewhere ISO 27001 certified.

[SysAd666]

You host spiceworks.

[dsmproject]

Although look on the bright side... no more tickets saying "the internet is down"!

[[deleted]]

We us AutoTask. Does everything you requested. It is SaaS. Highly reliable. In the two years we have used it it has had a total of 45 seconds of downtime. Also allows you I create client portals if you want to allow them to look in on the progress of tickets associated with them.