IT helpdesk management systems

[DO1]

Hi all

 

Our network and support requirements have grown to the point where spreadsheets and a shared Outlook mailbox have made the helpdesk and IT support activities borderline unmanageable. We also have an on-going issue with staff who continue to phone/email all technicians personally and then get three responses to the same problem… Therefore, we are now looking at IT Helpdesk management platforms and would love to know what the community think we should be considering. We have looked at both OP SmartDesk and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus based on forum posts on this site and like the simplicity of the former and features of latter. We don’t adhere to any kind of support framework such as ITIL, however I can see something like this being utilised in the near future. All options are on the in table (paid and free)

I am also keen to find out if the community are managing their service desks on premise or cloud hosted and what you feel are the pros and cons of both.

 

Hope you can help

[hardtailstar]

Most people here use Spiceworks

[dry]

Have a look at Spiceworks, who offer both an on-site and cloud helpdesk free of charge. You can set it up in minutes if you just want to have a try.

 

I've been using Spiceworks for years and it's been brilliant. Honestly just having a helpdesk makes your job 100 times more manageable than relying on emails/post-it notes/memory!

[darkstar_bam]

We use Freshdesk, it's all webbased

[DO1]

Have a look at Spiceworks, who offer both an on-site and cloud helpdesk free of charge. You can set it up in minutes if you just want to have a try.

 

I've been using Spiceworks for years and it's been brilliant. Honestly just having a helpdesk makes your job 100 times more manageable than relying on emails/post-it notes/memory!

Are you using spiceworks on prem? In the past when we played around with spiceworks network scans we found that on a well resourced server it would periodically fail; there were frequent error msgs about being unable to process further requests. This and the embedded advertising kind of put us off...

[synaesthesia]

We use OSTicket after having previously used OPSmartDesk. It's been a lot more reliable, much more customisable and does everything we need of it. We looked at Spiceworks but had similar issues with reliability.

[FN-GM]

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/178623-helpdesk-software.html

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/182479-school-helpdesk-system.html

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/network-classroom-management/178112-helpdesk-software.html

[TraylerD]

This week we moved helpdesk from Sharepoint to Spiceworks Cloud and all seems to be going well.

[dry]

Are you using spiceworks on prem? In the past when we played around with spiceworks network scans we found that on a well resourced server it would periodically fail; there were frequent error msgs about being unable to process further requests. This and the embedded advertising kind of put us off...

Funnily enough I've had experience of both. My previous workplace (a secondary school) used Spiceworks on-premises and used the network scan part of it. Didn't have similar issues to what you've mentioned but I suppose every network is different. To be honest we used it almost solely for the helpdesk and the other parts of Spiceworks were a bonus.

 

At my current workplace I use Spiceworks cloud version, but again it's purely a helpdesk- and even then it's mainly a tool for me to use to manage my time. I haven't dabbled with AD integration yet but there seem to be upgrades rolled out almost weekly. The release notes always get comments and you can submit feature requests too. It's still a fairly new branch of Spiceworks so there are features that are missing, which are included in the on-premises version.

[jdell]

I have my team using Solarwinds WebHelpDesk, this is the 3rd establishment I have installed it for and the key behind its success for me is the level of flexibility you have with it, if you really want to customise the set up you can. Especially to suit working in an ITIL compliant way. Spiceworks is fine as a means of recording requests etc, but if you ever look to grow into a department with ITIL at its core then you will find Spiceworks cannot achieve this as its not set up in the right way. I am move than happy to show you the custom configuration we use to make SolwarWinds WHD a super tool for a very busy IT department.

[DO1]

We use OSTicket after having previously used OPSmartDesk. It's been a lot more reliable, much more customisable and does everything we need of it. We looked at Spiceworks but had similar issues with reliability.

 

What kind of issues were you have with OPSmartDesk?