We're looking at changing our incident management software at work to something cheaper. We're using HP Openview Service Desk at the moment - can anyone else recommend any helpdesk software they're using at the moment?

we use something called InfraEnterprise... It seems to work quite nicely, web based and evidently fairly customisable... I can't tell you much more than that.

infraenterprise.com.au

I use Request Tracker - opensource so the price is right.

+1 to RT

We're scoping out Remedy .. don't think it'd be cheaper than HP Service Desk though.

Mongie - I was looking at that before, looks like it does everything really which is good.

What size organisations are you using RT? Just to give you an idea the company I work for has around 2000 employees.

It certainly works fine for what we use it for...

http://www.kayako.com/

We use supportsuite where I am - $500 for a license. Pretty awesome, simple and easy.

We use Cerberus here. I've been really happy with it. It's free for 2 users, and then starts to cost money.

We use RT and it sucks f***ing balls for us. It's slow as s*** using MySQL as the database; I'm talking 20second+ page loads.

Check out Fogbugz; its more a bug tracking system but the customer management stuff is awesome as well.

i think we've written our own here

the only thing slower than it, is the support people behind it!

my calls take so long to be answered!

HP DeskView suxs big hairy ones...

We're leaving Remedy behind to go to ITSM 7

we use remedy

our desk uses remedy as well. its pretty good now they have fixed the memory leak in ie - performance depends on how colossal your database is.

We're leaving Remedy behind to go to ITSM 7

ahaha you poor bastard

I'm using polar helpdesk, granted there's only 2 people in my support team though.

we use infra too, it aint too bad. we're on version 7 and its okay, a little slow though. reporting is excellent in some ways and balls in others. i like the sound of infra 8 though.

We use Remedy. I guess it depends on how many calls you churn a week. We raise up to 20000 calls a week.

You people using RT - what DB and OS are you running it on?

MrHarware, we're using v7 as well

govt dept?

negatory. big business advisory :P

ah. do you find infra 7 a bit on the slow side, as in it takes a second or three to change pages when you go to forward or defer a call, or close a call etc?

a second maybe, but not 3... I find it fast enough... I don't really have any problems with it at all.

Sounds more like a hardware or SQL issue to me than a fault with the product. Maybe it doesn't scale well though...

At the moment we use infra enterprise. It is slow and has been poorly configured - possibly not the fault of the application itself but for the lack of definition given by the people that organised its purchase and installation, and then that lack of definition was probably only present because they couldn't pin business users down as to what it was they required from the software - it's the public service so it's very hard to get anyone to make any decision that they could be held accountable for.

if someone in my team is working on a 'ticket', then no one else can take it over to close it. In what world would you require that tickets in a 24x7 data center can only be worked on by one team member and can't be actioned by any others?

If the helpdesk hasn't forwarded on a ticket to us yet but we know it's urgent, we can't take ownership of it and close or comment on it.. so we still use email for handling all our calls and as the tickets finally come in, close them off..

then a ticket finally comes through once it's been to every other group in the organisation first, because stating as the 2nd line in the body of the incident 'Please assign to [group name]' doesn't do squat... and you try to do something helpful like make it the child of a larger incident but because that incidents been solved you can't link to it.. so you add a comment saying this is a child of such and such and you know that the service desk won't do anything about it.

Then 1 out of every four times you go to close a case it'll time out, not enough for you to try again straight away, but it freezes, then you have to cancel right back out of the incident, go back in to it, make all your updates again then press the save button and hope this time it won't happen again

and do not try searching for a case you worked on previously even if you know exactly what it was about, there's no point. it won't come up. you need to track important cases in email/notepad then you can search on the infra number which comes back reasonably quick, unless you don't have 'include closed', 'include resolved' cases both ticked, cause f*** knows what state the case is in and by default it'll only return open.

makes for a pretty pointless incident management software, it makes for an even s***tier release management software which we are now having to use it as since they took away our web app, and don't bother about using it for reporting on the amount of work you have done, they didn't buy that functionality.

I've been using infra for nearly 2 years, through several itterations of bugs, updates, versions and fixes. The best bug was that when you attached files to a ticket it may add or remove bytes at will, corrupting the attachment. This was great when we first started using it for release management.

I don't know why people insist on moving to 3rd party applications when they have large inhouse development teams and are going to get much better results writing a simple incident management package themselves, which will be tailored for their needs, rather than rushing in someone else's application that's been designed to be as generic as possible and you've now got to go to them for simple support.

um...

I don't know what version you're using nats, but I don't have any of the issues you're talking about.

We can take ownership of tickets easily, from within other groups etc... I also have no issues with attachments, or with searching. I'd definatley say that theres something wrong with your implemenation of it...

we use it for incidents and for resource tracking.

We use fogbugz for development and support incidents... Works well and is simple. + it now has ajax loving in it...

Trog we use RT on one of our fedora boxes with mysql backend. We're only a small business here (about 40 employees, 2 techs and about 600 tickets in total :P)

Trog we use RT on one of our fedora boxes with mysql backend. We're only a small business here (about 40 employees, 2 techs and about 600 tickets in total :P)

What is your average page load time (the runtime thing in the bottom left side)?

hey trog, you guys should check out cerberus. it's pretty good. Is used by thinkgeek and some other technocool peeps so can't be all bad.

What is your average page load time (the runtime thing in the bottom left side)?

Time to display: 0.302451

I've never noticed it to be slow. Although we use it more as a job/development queue to store various features/bugs rather than in a help desk situation with constant daily use.

hey trog, you guys should check out cerberus. it's pretty good. Is used by thinkgeek and some other technocool peeps so can't be all bad.

I will, ta. We're after more of a complicated product though - something that does bug tracking, support and general task management all in one. Unfortunately that is a bit of a tall order and reflected by the lack of products available that really cater to all those areas effectively in the one package.

Lack of OpenSource products.. there's probably a bunch of commercial ones.

Not really - they're really more tailored to specific tasks - and for good reason as they are fairly different things conceptually. I would love to write our own but it's a lot of work :(

I will, ta. We're after more of a complicated product though - something that does bug tracking, support and general task management all in one. Unfortunately that is a bit of a tall order and reflected by the lack of products available that really cater to all those areas effectively in the one package.

It's very workflow oriented. I bet you could trick it into doing bugtracking via workflow mechanisms. It does have some task/project management stuff built in as well, but I haven't really used it much.

we wrote our own. I was impressed - the kid was one day out of uni and came up with all himself.. not bad for a WoW player...

it's nice to be able to track a few hundred thousand physical items via barcode along with customer history, and associated info. hmm... we're getting closer to 'Big Brother' though. Someone suggested tagging data from security cam feeds to item security cam feeds like Walmart do.. dunno if I like that one.

still, sap + .net2 = win

if only it didn't suck serious dick with Vista Biz Ed. Someone hurry up and bring out a 50-bazillion giggidybit megahurts cpu with a kickarse videocard built in

last edited by koopz at 04:31:46 26/Apr/07

fizzer, did you just do a pretty typical install or did you have to tailor it at all to your environment?

I didn't actually install it but as far as I know it was pretty out of the box thrown on the server.

STAY THE f*** AWAY FROM MARVAL!!!

EDIT: No. It's a f***ing piece of s***. I don't really care if you get it or not, but it'll end up costing your company a s*** heap to maintain and support it.

last edited by Ecstasy at 21:25:57 01/May/07

Hey guys I heard about this one called marval. Rave reviews.. you should try that.

Yeah, Ecstasy likes it so much he doesn't want to share...