In my experience, having used 4 different help desk systems over the last 10 years, I have to say the modern variants are much better than the old, convoluted, and expensive systems that were popular at the turn of the century. Currently, I am a happy user of www.focalscope.com . It has all the features one expects from a help desk solution, but an interface that puts it together in a way that makes it easy to use, not confusing. That and the fact that it is reasonably priced + cloud hosted, made it an clear-cut winner for me.