Best help desk ticketing system?

huskerpat said:
We used to use Heat but have moved to Frontrange's ITSM.
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I'm just wondering if there was any reasoning behind not going with other ticketing system programs? Or, what made you choose ITSM over others?

Thanks
 
I like Zendesk alright... Using it at my current position. Email integration is very snapy and easy for users to use. I have used serveral versions of Remedy and while it's old and crappy in some ways, the most comprehensive tracking system I ever used was a modified version that I used while working for the state of Washington. I haven't worked with anything else that was so customizeable or worked with so many requests and so many IT people.
 
We use HEAT and have had good luck with it. It is very customizable and easy to work with.
 
I work at a large University and we use HEAT. It works really well. It's fast and simple, but looks like a crappy Access form.
 
We've had JIRA up and running for awhile(not fully online) now just building up the structure, issues, etc. It seems to be very customizable for the most part with a few exceptions. It's a little lacking in the ability to setup administrators for individual projects. Instead, everybody with any administrator rights are global and can do almost all the same mistakes/damage/snooping.

I guess it just sucks for what we originally wanted to use it for which was to spread it University wide(the Boss's plan) with all kinds of different departments using it for different issues/tasks/records/etc. The problem though is that everyone with any Administrator rights can see everyone's(other departments) stuff not related to their specific area.

I did find it cool that it can integrate with Gmail with a little work(OpenSocial).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSmZnWv0Dus

They also just released a new version but I haven't really read through the whole list of information to see what the major changes are yet. I really wish there were some in depth reviews of ticketing systems.

Thanks for the input everyone. I would really like to hear from people with JIRA experience. Please tell.:p

Numara Footprints was turned down to the high price tag.
 
we use jira for code tracking on software development (multiple projects) and it issue tracking. we tried a few packages and this works best for us. overall I think its great, the package it very customizable and the devs and support with it have been great which is great for those 'wtf' moments. new employees have all be able to figure it out pretty quick too. its easy to move issue between projects and tie everything together, and users can share tasks and workspaces without much effort.

sometimes searching in jira makes me want to choke myself though.

we actually want people to have access to all of the projects and area so this has not been an issue for us.
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My company uses JIRA and it works pretty well. It seems highly customizable which is probably why we use it. The person in charge of it has put quite a lot of work into customizing all the workflows.

FYI - We're a small IT consulting company, so we use it for all kinds of project tracking
 
I missed the exact what(wasn't mentioned, lol), but today during a quick meeting we were all notified that JIRA may be unable to make it through the initial testing because something is wrong with the way it uses emailing(that's all the info we got).

Do you guys that use JIRA know of any big problems/issues/bugs/lack of features with the way JIRA gathers or sends out e-mails? Just curious?

Also, anyway you guys that use JIRA, can you find out from the guys at your organization that maintain JIRA, what they hate/dislike about it? The information gathered from a long time user may be very informative.

Thanks
 
I'm starting to look into GLPI as it has a lot of the features I'm hoping to utilize. Just thought I'd give one more alternative.
 
Just for the sake of the thread.

I spent a lot of time reviewing helpdesk products over about 3 months and eventually went with Parature. Really when it came down to cost, their sales team was willing to match/beat any of the competition. It's worked extremely well for us (1000 user base spread across 20 US offices).
 
O2Flow said:
Just for the sake of the thread.

I spent a lot of time reviewing helpdesk products over about 3 months and eventually went with Parature. Really when it came down to cost, their sales team was willing to match/beat any of the competition. It's worked extremely well for us (1000 user base spread across 20 US offices).
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Just out of curiosity, was JIRA one of the possible candidates? If so, why did you pass on it?

Also, I looked at the demos on Parature, doesn't seem bad at all. However, with that said, the people in charge here are very cheap.
 
With some setup, Jira is pretty awesome, and works well as a ticket system despite its bug-tracking origins.
 
Berg0 said:
I use atlassian jira as an issue tracking system. I manage the IT dept of a software development company with a large hosting infrastructure, so we have a ton of spill over. it works well enough for issue tracking, not only bug traffic, but I find that reporting is a bit unwieldy.

We set up different projects as queues (helpdesk, project related issues, etc, etc) and it seems to work well.

I can answer any specific questions you may have if you'd like, but I sort of don't know where to start...
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Hi,

I was curious as to what you mean by the reporting is unwieldy? We've just finished setting it up and just started actually using it. I have not had a chance to do any reporting with it so I was hoping you could give me some or your pros and cons with it?

Thanks
 
I'm back now, we've been planning/designing/structuring JIRA 4.0.1 for use as a ticketing system. It really comes down to JIRA sucks if you desire any functionality. It's simple, this program is not meant to be a ticketing system by any means.

So I'm back to square one, what is the "best bang for the buck" ticketing system around?

JIRA = Out
Request Tracker = Out
Numera is too expensive(well from what my boss says anyway!)
Checked out Parature and ten minutes into the live demo, I was falling asleep
?
?
?
 
J32P said:
I'm back now, we've been planning/designing/structuring JIRA 4.0.1 for use as a ticketing system. It really comes down to JIRA sucks if you desire any functionality. It's simple, this program is not meant to be a ticketing system by any means.

So I'm back to square one, what is the "best bang for the buck" ticketing system around?

JIRA = Out
Request Tracker = Out
Numera is too expensive(well from what my boss says anyway!)
Checked out Parature and ten minutes into the live demo, I was falling asleep
?
?
?
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What functionality are you looking for? We have 10s of thousands of tickets in a JIRA setup at my employer, JIRA has been really customizable and responsive. Have you called up Atlassian and asked for help?
 
We use JIRA. Love it. We used to use a Lotus Notes based system (still use it for customer issues) but had all sorts of replication issues. We have offices around the world that all hit one server so there's no sync issues. We've put a few custom workflows in place for various projects that don't follow the "standard" workflow provided. If you've got folks that can code in Java you can make it do anything you need it to do.
 
The school I work has is using a program called Sys-Aid, from a company called Ilient. Having used Footprints, JIRA, Track-It, and a couple of others- this was an awesome choice for us.

It's a fully integrated helpdesk, category based for problems; includes a self-help option, email service, as well as the ability to manage individual workstations on both a remote basis, and generate reports on any changes to the workstations (really really useful in a high school environment)
 
ocellaris said:
What functionality are you looking for? We have 10s of thousands of tickets in a JIRA setup at my employer, JIRA has been really customizable and responsive. Have you called up Atlassian and asked for help?
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The problem doesn't seem to appear until JIRA gets populated with 200,000-350,000 tickets/issues/requests, 50-100 projects, thousands of users in the DB(not active), lots of heavy dashboards, etc.

Do you know what hardware you're running your instance on?

How often do you reindex? Do you utilize a heavy GUI based dashboard? How active users(logged in and working) do have? We plan on having 175-225 constant users.

Our JIRA would need to go big compared to most smaller organizations. Our current ticketing system has over 500,000 tickets/issues/requests in it. We assume our new one could have that after 4-6 years time. My personal worry is that JIRA doesn't scale well when it gets big. Java is also not the code to go with if you want to keep your memory threshold low.

http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?threadID=38958&tstart=45
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Here's a extensive list of some pretty serious issues I've came across regarding JIRA functionality, or lack of.
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-11125
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-9
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1330 (Field level security which they said they won't ever do)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-6381
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5865
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-2983
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-8874
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-2220 (amazingly, you cannot inactivate a user in JIRA - a pretty basic design in database/user management. This means your user admin will not be sending you any Christmas presents)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1688 (User mgmt permission)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1655
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5959
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-9091
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-6146 (there is no issue locking! For large installations, this could be a dealbreaker)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-7211
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-11990
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-11165
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-8689 (This is a necessity for helpdesk users - to lock down their ability to mess themselves up)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-12650 (imperative if using email as issue creation tool)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5509 (necessary if you want more than 1 user account per client)
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-12306
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We use JIRA. Love it. We used to use a Lotus Notes based system (still use it for customer issues) but had all sorts of replication issues. We have offices around the world that all hit one server so there's no sync issues. We've put a few custom workflows in place for various projects that don't follow the "standard" workflow provided. If you've got folks that can code in Java you can make it do anything you need it to do.
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I just want to note that making this work the way we need it to must be done as a plug-in, if you write directly into the core code, it will break during an upgrade. I guess I'm just pointing out that you're kinda doing their work for them with this. I also want to point out that the latest version of JIRA has more eye candy but none of the major issues have been fixed that are more then 3-5 years old. The company does not seem to have their priorities in order.


The school I work has is using a program called Sys-Aid, from a company called Ilient. Having used Footprints, JIRA, Track-It, and a couple of others- this was an awesome choice for us.
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Will check it out, what's there to lose. By the way, what did think of JIRA? And why would you stop using Footprints + Track-It, I thought that was the best ticketing system?

Last, is it expensive?
 
pcbird said:
We have offices around the world that all hit one server so there's no sync issues.
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Do you mean that two people never get caught working on the same ticket? Just trying to completely understand what you mean by "no sync issues".

Thanks
 
J32P said:
The problem doesn't seem to appear until JIRA gets populated with 200,000-350,000 tickets/issues/requests, 50-100 projects, thousands of users in the DB(not active), lots of heavy dashboards, etc.

Do you know what hardware you're running your instance on?

How often do you reindex? Do you utilize a heavy GUI based dashboard? How active users(logged in and working) do have? We plan on having 175-225 constant users.

Here's a extensive list of some pretty serious issues I've came across regarding JIRA functionality, or lack of.
Click to expand...

We have about 50K tickets in ~20 projects. Roughly 75 people logged in at a time (mostly doing nothing), most people are running simple dashboards. Everything runs on a VM inside a Sun Blade Server. So we are way under your numbers. If the whole thing collapses @100K tickets or whatever, I would have no idea (yet).
 
Bumping an old thread, I have been demo'ing tons of ticketing systems and so far I like RT the best.
I run a small it consulting business, and we are just now implementing a ticketing system/mail server for clients. So far, i'm loving RT as it is stupid easy (send email and bam!).
 
@J32P:

Yes we did look into JIRA but needed more from a user standpoint. As you posted, it works great for some but in our situation it lacked functionality that we needed without major customization.
 
I have been using Cerberus helpdesk for a while, and it is very flexible (you get the access to the code and PHP scripts), relatively easy to install and is cheap (no subscriptions or maintenance fees).

http://www.cerberusweb.com/
 
We used to user HP Openview Service Desk which was decent. It was just SLOW but think that was more a server issue and we were like 5 versions behind. I would have loved for them to just upgrade it... instead we went with Remedy. It's ok, but I liked HP's solution better. I hate how Remedy separates requests from incidents the way it does. ServiceDesk had a better idea of using the same interface for all types, and just have a pull down. Our helpdesk always gets them mixed up so it's easy to just change a drop down vs create a whole new ticket. I also hate how requests require you to click through each step to close it. You can't just go in the drop down and click closed. Also I hate how it has no solution field, so the customer does not get anything other than a generic email. Another thing that really gets me is the "you must enter time spent!" thing every single time. Even if I just want to make a simple change I always have to enter something. With requests it's a pita because when you click through each step you have to enter a 1.

Lot of other annoyances like that. It's also much slower than ServiceDesk, but again that could also be a server thing, not so much the product.
 
I recently found osTicket, which is free. There are some downsides to it though; it hasn't been updated in over a year ( ie: may be dead ) and it doesn't track time spent on each ticket, but for a smallish shop those aren't huge concerns.
 
dashpuppy said:
how about this ? I just ran across this looking through all the options for windows web app installer.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/nservice.aspx
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I was going to try to use this before the boss decided he wanted to spend 10k on a crappy BMC Service Desk Express. POS. Interface is slow and clunky and not very intuitive at all.

nService installs easy with MS Web Platform Installer. Easiest thing since sliced bread
 
jadams said:
I was going to try to use this before the boss decided he wanted to spend 10k on a crappy BMC Service Desk Express. POS. Interface is slow and clunky and not very intuitive at all.

nService installs easy with MS Web Platform Installer. Easiest thing since sliced bread
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Yeah i know, i just installed gallery & wordpress on my new server :) alot easier than doing it with debian linux :)
 
We use SysAid where I work. There are 2 of us in the department with around 100 users. The program itself works great, I have it set to email me which also goes to my iPhone. The biggest issue is users not putting tickets in and just calling/stopping me when they see me and it doesn't get documented.
 
I am not a fan of SysAid's tech support and overall customer service. The software seems stable enough since it rarely gets busted, but I would definitely choose something else just because of how they operate.
 
If this hasn't been mentioned before, GLPI is great and is open-source (free). Just setup a dedicated server and house the web interface and database on it and you're good to go.
 
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