To all Sys Admins out there, a few questions:

E

electech98

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 12, 2002
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1) If you were to have the perfect help-desk software, what features would be a necessity to you?

2) Along those same lines, what features would not be necessary, but really cool to have?

3) What sorts of things are important to you for tracking inventory and trouble tickets in help-desk software? What different ways would you want to track that info?

4) What would you like a piece of help-desk software to be able to connect to / collaborate with? (example: phone systems, chat software, etc.)

This is for a project that my friend and I are working on.

Thanks!

EDIT: Mods, if this is in the wrong place, I apologize. Didn't know where best to put this thread.
 
1) I would want a "Managed Workstation" client on my user's desktops. It would have the ability to submit a trouble ticket that would automatically send the following to the server:

a) A screen shot of the most recently focused application
b) A task manager list of all processes
c) A user filled out form that would be customizable via html.

I would want this software to track the tickets from the individual users and show them feed back of the status. For example, we could have, "Unassigned", "Assigned", "In Progress", "Resolved" and "Unresolved".

When a user opened a ticket, it would go to the central server, which would then assign it to a logged in technician in a customizable order ( by technician preference, round robin, random, ect.. ). It would be important that the ticket problem catagory be a determining characteristic for the system when choosing a technician ( ie: I'm trained in novell, so any problems classified as "login" would go to me first, then other technicians next ).

There would need to be a second client, "Technician Workstation", which would reside on the techs computer. There would need to be customizable fields for records attached to a problem. I have found systems that tie into the phone systems to be problematic, and the data they gather to be unreliable. Instead, I would want these to be simple manual entry of data from the technician. Although being able to email through this interface to the user would be handy ( and have it logged ).

Techs would need to be able to perform a wide range of activities on the users station, but as there are tools already available for most of what I'm thinking ( ps tools and vnc ), again a customizable interface would be preferred. In fact, the Managed workstation client should keep a database record accessable from the tech client of where the user is logged in, so all you have to do is click a button to do any of the management functions.

I would use an open and simple database technology for all data storage. Postgres comes to mind, but mysql would work for this application too. I would avoid things that do not have an easy and open interface in ( mssql, sybase ) or that are horrendously expensive ( oracle ). I'd make the table structure clean and clear, even if that means sacrificing some speed to accomplish that.

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll think of some more, and I'll post it later.
 
Take a look at Numara's Track It software... and Prism Patch and Funk Proxy... Combine them and you will have the best thing going.
 
I actually work for a company that makes help desk software (not going to say which)

but pretty much every 'major' help desk app includes the ability to do most anything 'needed' for a helpdesk...it's all a matter of stability vs cost vs usability, and if it doesnt have something you're looking for you can call them up and throw them some cash for a customization....we do it all the time.

We've done phone system integration, chat integration, custom reporting, automatic notifications, file attachments, automatic conversion of emails into tickets....all kinds of stuff. Help desk software can get expensive pretty quickly especially with all the competition out there.
 
Heard of Spiceworks Desktop?

It pretty much does the whole of the Tech. Help Desk via a web based interface. I've had a look at it and like the way it works - complete with tickets, networking monitoring and discovery and some other neat features.
 
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