Cross Platform Help Desk Applications? 42
gillrock asks: "My company is about to conduct a search for a new Help Desk ticketing application to replace the home grown one currently in place. With luck, maybe we can find one that has asset inventory tracking as a feature or add-on plus some other nice bells and whistles. My biggest concern is that the group will end up choosing something that is 'Windows Only' that won't function with any flavor's of UNIX or at least have a web component. Are there any good, full featured, cross-platform friendly Help Desk apps out there that will make us UNIX Admins happy?
We're a small shop, so something that works out of the box would be best."
Remedy (Score:2, Insightful)
Remedy (Score:2, Informative)
Just remember -- Remedy is targetted as a desktop tool -- using remedy for change management or asset management can be done for non-desktop environments (think networks, firewalls, etc), but it's not a clean fit.
Also, Remedy installations are only as good as their configuration and customization. We learned at my place of business that the out-of-the-box remedy implementation needs a good bit of help and customization. As long as you're willing to spend time, energy, and money on it, it can be a very good solution.
Re:Remedy (Score:1)
One thing that can be useful if setup correctly is the automated generation of tickets. There is a script available for Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) that allows it to automatically generate tickets when one of the events it monitors goes bad. You have to tweak it to minimize false positives, but it can be handy to have a ticket there when a machine goes down and you even record the solution for the problem in Remedy in case the problem happens again.
Above all else, make the use of the system as smooth and as easy as possible. People will just bypass the system if it's too complex, too slow or tickets aren't responded to.
Us.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Us.. (Score:1)
Yes, rt rocks. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Us.. (Score:1)
We use RT and once we got 10 thousand tickets or so it became unmanagable. The database abstraction module that RT uses coupled with the way that they query the database has made it all but unusable once you fill the database with more than a couple thousand tickets, at least on our machine, which is a PIII 800 with a gig of RAM...
I've done everything I can to fix the performance issues (it's running under mod perl, the database gets cleaned up with "vacuum analyze", we cleaned out old dead tickets), and it's still dog slow even locally.
We like a lot of RT's features but as soon as we grew to more than a couple of support people, it fell down, hard. :(
Re:Us.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Even with 40+ people using it at a time, it still holds up just fine.
Re:Us.. (Score:1, Offtopic)
all of them? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just my 2cp.
Yes -- X-Platform == Web-based (Score:3, Interesting)
I know folks that use wwwreq [ucr.edu] and it seems to work as well as the people you have actually handling the tickets.
Also, see this page [linas.org] for a bigger list.
Bugzilla Works (Score:3, Interesting)
perfect tracker (Score:3, Informative)
About $600 I think.
avensoft perfect tracker [avensoft.com]
helpdesks.com (Score:3, Informative)
Re:helpdesks.com (Score:1)
As an aside, I found helpdesk.com by trying the old www.YOUR_SEARCH_HERE.com approach (introduced to me when a friend wanted to find information on boobs [boobs.com].
Heat (Score:2)
www.frontrange.com
Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine. (Score:2)
Re:Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine. (Score:1)
Re:Heat (Score:1)
The web interface is a java applet to a citrix-like thin client, *not* what I consider a web interface.
There's a java client for Linux, but I haven't tried that yet.
Re:Heat (Score:2)
Re:Heat (Score:2)
Re:Heat - Helpdesk Admin Nightmare (Score:2)
Vantive? Use old text based menu helpdesk proggies (Score:2)
There used to be a couple Unix based text packages (as well as many mainframe based text helpdesk packages). My experiance is while they take a little more training to use most seasoned help desk operators prefered text baed rather then point and click gui (cause once they learned the hot keys they could blaze though tickets faster then you could click). You would also solve the "platform issue" since it would be telnet or ssh type connection to a central host. Should be cheaper overall too, only needing a central server and lesser clients, but I that is my opinion.
Re:Vantive? Use old text based menu helpdesk progg (Score:2)
RT (Score:5, Informative)
RT is very good. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about it. It is very much worth checking out.
Re:RT (Score:2)
Re:RT (Score:1)
How about, different solutions? (Score:2)
Have you considered finding two seperate packages that save their data in a customizable format to a database?
Set both packages to save to the format the database will use. The beauty of a database is that the front end's using it don't have to be identical as long as they all talk to it the same way.
Rather than getting two identical copies of the interface for two opposite operating systems, why not get two different programs and just make sure they speak the same language to the database?
If this is even possible with commercial help-desk software.
Re:How about, different solutions? (Score:1)
Remedy, again (Score:1)
One recomendation: Stay away from ANYTHING that's Java based. Those have long loading times, are prone to crashing, are slow to use and are generally just a pain in the @ss. I've used some Java applications that choke a 1.4 processor with 512 megs of RAM.
Re:Remedy, again (Score:1)
I second that.... (Score:1)
A free pross platform tool (Score:1)
Then you could use a free, opensource product. On the project I'm working on right now we use f2w Helpdesk [sf.net]. We had to install it on a linux Box. We had problems installing the prerequisite on our Solaris box. The software is quite simple to manage, and quite powerfull. Is 100% customisable and can even be accessed from Lynx based browser !!
The product is python [python.org] and zope [zope.org] based.
Whatever you pick. (Score:1)
WonderDesk (Score:1)
Your solution, in a word... (Score:1)
Or maybe ... stick with what you have got ? (Score:1)
In my experience, these beasts come in 2 rough flavours : the "database with a front end" flavour at around the 500 USD mark, and the "help desk, ticketing, workflow, knowledgemanagement, coffee preparation and universe rescuing" flavour, at a price you only find out from the leather-bound ring binder of a fragrant sales representative.
If your company is going for the cheap flavour - pick one, learn to live with it. It will almost certainly not be quite right for you, but you should be able to make it do what you want.
If your company is going for the all-singing, all-dancing flavour, seriously consider whether you need it, and whether it would not be cheaper, easier and less painful to take that wad of currency and insert it into various bodily orifices.
Here's what I have found to be the case : regardless of the promises of the venduh, it will be expensive and difficult to customize the product to meet your needs; you are likely to end up with a kludge.
The "value-added" components will cause more trouble than they solve - I have especially fond memories of an automated inventory application which didn't recognize my ergonomic keyboard and automatically raised helpdesk tickets for the support team to bring me a new keyboard; they religiously turned up every day for about 2 weeks with a newly ordered keyboard...doh.
The more politically active managers will use the data produced by the system to "prove" that one department or another is more expensive/productive/careless/likely to break company policy/set fire to the building than another. The better the reports from the helpdesk system, the more bitter the political battles.
The automatic email reminders will be forwarded to everybody's trash folder because of the false positives; of course, the vital real business-critical problem will not be spotted until the hard drive of the chief exec has been filled with pictures of britney spears, a chicken, and 3 gallons of maple syrup.
In short - with these things, I tend to feel that just a little less than enough is usually more than sufficient. It's a great way to waste enormous amounts of time, money, and credibility when you could be doing stuff for your customers.