Cross Platform Help Desk Applications?

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

[ZeroLogic]

Remedy seems to be a standard in this arena. It has a good web client and an ok windows client...

Remedy

[roachmotel3]

Remedy is the obvious answer here, because it does provide not only a wintel client, but also a web interface. I believe that the web interface is also fairly complete. Remedy also provides many modules for asset management, change management, etc.

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

[Kowh]

Remedy depends far too much on being configured well. It's far too easy to make a system that no one wants to use, causing many to bypass the system and defeating the purpose of the system. Remedy's Windows' interface could do with some improvement as well, most Remedy windows are far too cluttered and have many fields that aren't descriptive enough as to what they do. I haven't used the web interface, so I can't comment on that.

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..

[Xunker]

We (my company, that is) uses this [fsck.com]. It's web based totally and extensible with perl.

Re:Us..

[PenguinOpus]

We use the RT tracking system as well. 1800 tickets and it seems very reliable. Good updates with pay-for support also an option.

Yes, rt rocks.

[bill_mcgonigle]

rt2 also handles attachments very well, big for user support.

Re:Us..

[Ranger Rick]

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..

[dev0n]

We use RT at my company (I'm the technical support manager at a web hosting company), and we've had no problems. And we're well beyond the 10,000 ticket mark. :)

Even with 40+ people using it at a time, it still holds up just fine.

Re:Us..

[Telastyn]

*bump* me too.

all of them?

[ealar dlanvuli]

It's hard to find one that isn't web-based anymore. Be sure you have them do the demo in Mozilla on Linux though, I've always found having them do demos in a non-native environment lets you see through what the real product will function like.

Just my 2cp.

Yes -- X-Platform == Web-based

[4of12]

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

[Quizme2000]

My company publishes cross platform software and we use bugzilla to track bugs and request. With a few simple changes it could suit your purpose well.

perfect tracker

[monkeyserver.com]

perfect tracker was okay. It works for helpdesk as well as bug tracking, it is kinda messy to customize, but is pretty feature rich. That is a web-only interface and looks pretty good in linux and windows.
About $600 I think.

avensoft perfect tracker [avensoft.com]

helpdesks.com

[jspayne]

Helpdesks.com [helpdesks.com] is an excellent website that reviews a wide variety of help desk software solutions, from the dinky open source variety to the uber expensive hosted solutions. Go nuts! Jeff

Re:helpdesks.com

[eikonoklastes]

You bastard...you got this off while I was checking my comment preview. Anyways, the Open Directory [dmoz.org] has a lot of potential links. The first one being helpdesk.com.

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

[NetJunkie]

Check out Heat from Front Range. It has a web interface or Windows client. Works well and has asset tracking. You can also integrate their contact management system, GoldMine.

www.frontrange.com

Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine.

[Futurepower(R)]

Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine. I'm wondering if products from them are viable.

Re:Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine.

[dev0n]

GoldMine is such a disaster. When their sales rep came to show our sales team how to use it, he loaded a virus onto the network with their install cd. Oops. ;)

Re:Heat

[ajft]

We've just gone live with a HEAT installation where I work, so far5 all I can say is that it's _different_ to our old in-house system. Over 100M of Oracle client just to talk to the database seems excessive though!

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

[twilightzero]

The secret of HEAT is that ALL of the interface with the database is done through standard SQL calls. At a place I used to work at, one of our programmers hated the interface so much he created from scratch in about a week a new web interface for it. Everything we wanted on it, nothing we didn't. All it depends on is a preconfigured database (i.e. existing HEAT installation) and a good knowledge of programming :)

Re:Heat

[KnightStalker]

We used an older version of HEAT where I used to trudge the help desk. I sure hope they've improved it since '97, because it was a truly wretched piece of software then. Non-native widgets with bizarre behavior. Crashed all the time. Constantly corrupted the database (granted, we were using Access). And it was really slow, and not very feature-ful.

Re:Heat - Helpdesk Admin Nightmare

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

Really, Heat is an administrative nightmare. The database is in a constant state of corruption. Upgrades are next to impossible as a result. Our last version jump (6.01 to 6.4) took about 3 months to sort out for only about 50 users. And, we easily spent 5 figures for "support" from Frontrange to get everything working. I can't say the application functions poorly, though, from an end-user perspective. And, it does have lots of features. But, oh it sucks so very much to upgrade.

Vantive? Use old text based menu helpdesk proggies

[jsimon12]

If I remember right Vantive had a Unix/Linux client in addition to Windows and probably a couple others. Though my guess is Remedy and Vantive are going to be out of your price range, not to mention the fact that both are monolithic pieces of crap (but that is my personaly opinion).

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

[rtaylor]

Don't forget their webbased interface. Works perfectly fine in Galeon.

RT

[jkujawa]

http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/ [fsck.com]
RT is very good. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about it. It is very much worth checking out.

Re:RT

[jkujawa]

(oh, yes. RT is free software.)

Re:RT

[rnbc]

Indeed very good, with the minor problem of not supporting the concept of "customer", and therefore not having a customer's history. But in practice it works very well.

How about, different solutions?

[man_ls]

Seriously.

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?

[ealar dlanvuli]

The problem with this is there isn't a HL7/type proticol for ticket creation (sorry HL7 stuck in mind, been coding up an interface for past few days /cry). It would require more work than worth getting the programs queries molded into the format of your DB (the best solution would be if you could get the people to send XML queries, it would make them 190% easier to parse).

Remedy, again

[Sandman1971]

At my place of employment we use Remedy. It has everything you're looking for; windows client, *nix client and web interface. It can be fairly stable. The server portion runs on solaris (probably other *nixes as well, but never tried it). You can do asset tracking, order tracking, change management, etc... It's also fully customisable.

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

[Artemis]

The server portion of Remedy also runs well on NT4 Server/Win2k Server. Our setup has over 10,000 tickets and is still going strong just like when it was originally setup. Running on a Dual PIII/650 1GB RAM.

I second that....

[jrwillis]

The part about staying away from anything java based is correct. The state agency I work for uses a program called Service Center for ticket tracking and the such. Sometimes I really think the "Big Chief tablet and #2 pencil system" would work better and faster than that piece of junk. Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in.

A free pross platform tool

[Tsk]

The only way to have a cross-platform help-desk tool, is to access it from a web interface. Discard all non web interface product - but these days all products do provide such web access.
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.

[/dev/trash]

Do NOT get SupportMagic.

WonderDesk

[yycs]

My company just bought WonderDesk. You can check it out at http://www.wonderdesk.com. It is web based, runs on Windows or *nix and supports MySql (for a little more money) . We are VERY impressed with this product.

Your solution, in a word...

[Cosmic Intoxicant]

Filemaker.

Or maybe ... stick with what you have got ?

[PinglePongle]

Seriously, I doubt that cross-platform capabilities will be a huge issue (a previous post claimed that most serious contenders are cross-platform or at least web based - I reckon it's true...).

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.