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Every Time Footprints Up's a version, The Company gets bought out.

So far...
BMC
Numara
Unipress
Footprints Software
And I'm probably missing a company or two in there.

Use track it for tracking ticket, inventory and software. http://www.numarasoftware.com/track-it/

I used Numara Track-It! for a few years while doing desktop/server admin. There are some nice auditing tools in there which grab all the hardware and software info automatically. It is highly configurable too. I'm sure there are better solutions out there, but that is what I used.

Of 4 people managing about 1200 machines across Canada (yes, and I'm not exagerating) - we use this program called Track-It! by Numara.

It does well enough for us, lets us assign different tasks to different technicians, give them different prioritees, expected completed dates, notes and all that nice stuff. The only thing it doesn't really do is sub-tasks. It does handle Attachments, Prioritization, and you can set it up to generate these projects based on incoming emails (emailing support@mycompany.com will generate a task for your technicians to do).

However, I don't feel like thats the one for you. For about 4 months I worked with a company called Neosystems, and they have a project called iTrak . It sounds alot like what you are using for.

At any given time, I need to be able to jump back to one of these items and pick up where I left off. CHECK ... for hierarchical subtasks, CHECK attachments CHECK, and prioritization CHECK. Ideally it would be a desktop app, but a locally-hostable web app CHECK would be okay. In some of these projects I may want to include proprietary information, which I really don't want floating out in the cloud outside of my control *

*That last part, I'm not entirely sure of. From what I recall, they push their updates to all their clients at once, which makes it sound like the business is hosting the application. However, they're a relatively small company, with a great product. It was a real pleasure working on it, but sorting out AJAX bugs just got the better of me, I was fresh out of post secondary. I highly recommend checking them out, maybe giving them a call to see if their product will work for you.

This might be a little bit of overkill if you just have a handful of employees, but we use TrackIt. I believe it is SQL based, its fairly simple to customize views, and there are a bunch of reports that you can run based on what is currently open/has been closed. I wouldn't know too much about those, though, me being just a lowly tech ;-) There are several other modules that you can install that can help keep track of purchasing, software, etc. Therefore my earlier concern that this would be too much for a company of your size. Still, thought I'd throw it out there.

I can't agree with this more.

I also run a small help desk (me & 5 students) that has a lot of turnover (can't keep the students forever) and very few overlapping shifts. What this means is that automation has become our friend. Help the users to create their own tickets and it'll save your staff a bunch of time.

We do this in several ways:

-E-mailing our help desk opens a ticket and fills in as much detail as it can from the e-mail address. It attempts an AD lookup as well if the domain is ours.

-Web forms. We have a couple of .asp scripts in place on our web server. One of these scripts is hooked into AD and sits on the Outlook Web Access login page. If someone needs help, their name/dept/phone/etc is all filled in for them and all they have to do is say what's not working. This keeps the person from having to fill in too much (which means they'll sometimes spend a bit more time on details rather than just saying "e-mail don't work."), it gives us accurate information, and it's conveniently located right below the login box!

-Calls are harder, of course, but I always ask my staff what ticket they are working on. If I get a blank look, they go back and go create a ticket, then resume work.

-Desk stop-bys. If possible I ask people in the offices to just create a ticket and we'll pick it up from there. If they e-mail me or a staff member directly, I'll open one for them if I have time, otherwise I ask them to do it.

-Voicemails are sent to us by our phone system as e-mails which, when sent to the desk, open their own ticket. So not only is the entire VM archived, but it is accessible even if it gets deleted or is purged from VM after 15 days. Plus we can send the VM ticket to others as necessary.

We use Numara Footprints for our system and I like it. It's pretty easy to use, customizable, and pretty expandable.

My final thought to all of this is to embrace automation. Anytime a computer or another person can make a ticket for you saves you a bit of time (excluding those with the "it doesn't work" phrase in the details).

Hope that helps!

the best it dept help center software. we just reviewed every solution at my job and found this one to be the absolute most complete and full of features that are actually usable. Numara Track-It 7.0 seriously takes the cake compared to everything else http://www.numarasoftware.com/