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Cross Platform Help Desk Applications?
gillrock asks: "My company is about to conduct a search for a new Help Desk ticketing application to replace the home grown one currently in place. With luck, maybe we can find one that has asset inventory tracking as a feature or add-on plus some other nice bells and whistles. My biggest concern is that the group will end up choosing something that is 'Windows Only' that won't function with any flavor's of UNIX or at least have a web component. Are there any good, full featured, cross-platform friendly Help Desk apps out there that will make us UNIX Admins happy?
We're a small shop, so something that works out of the box would be best."
Remedy seems to be a standard in this arena. It has a good web client and an ok windows client...
Remedy is the obvious answer here, because it does provide not only a wintel client, but also a web interface. I believe that the web interface is also fairly complete. Remedy also provides many modules for asset management, change management, etc.
Just remember -- Remedy is targetted as a desktop tool -- using remedy for change management or asset management can be done for non-desktop environments (think networks, firewalls, etc), but it's not a clean fit.
Also, Remedy installations are only as good as their configuration and customization. We learned at my place of business that the out-of-the-box remedy implementation needs a good bit of help and customization. As long as you're willing to spend time, energy, and money on it, it can be a very good solution.
We (my company, that is) uses this. It's web based totally and extensible with perl.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
It's hard to find one that isn't web-based anymore. Be sure you have them do the demo in Mozilla on Linux though, I've always found having them do demos in a non-native environment lets you see through what the real product will function like.
Just my 2cp.
I live in a giant bucket.
I know folks that use wwwreq and it seems to work as well as the people you have actually handling the tickets.
Also, see this page for a bigger list.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
My company publishes cross platform software and we use bugzilla to track bugs and request. With a few simple changes it could suit your purpose well.
"Get them before they get....
About $600 I think.
avensoft perfect tracker
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
Helpdesks.com is an excellent website that reviews a wide variety of help desk software solutions, from the dinky open source variety to the uber expensive hosted solutions. Go nuts! Jeff
rt2 also handles attachments very well, big for user support.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Check out Heat from Front Range. It has a web interface or Windows client. Works well and has asset tracking. You can also integrate their contact management system, GoldMine.
www.frontrange.com
If I remember right Vantive had a Unix/Linux client in addition to Windows and probably a couple others. Though my guess is Remedy and Vantive are going to be out of your price range, not to mention the fact that both are monolithic pieces of crap (but that is my personaly opinion).
There used to be a couple Unix based text packages (as well as many mainframe based text helpdesk packages). My experiance is while they take a little more training to use most seasoned help desk operators prefered text baed rather then point and click gui (cause once they learned the hot keys they could blaze though tickets faster then you could click). You would also solve the "platform issue" since it would be telnet or ssh type connection to a central host. Should be cheaper overall too, only needing a central server and lesser clients, but I that is my opinion.
http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/
RT is very good. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about it. It is very much worth checking out.
Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine. I'm wondering if products from them are viable.
Seriously.
Have you considered finding two seperate packages that save their data in a customizable format to a database?
Set both packages to save to the format the database will use. The beauty of a database is that the front end's using it don't have to be identical as long as they all talk to it the same way.
Rather than getting two identical copies of the interface for two opposite operating systems, why not get two different programs and just make sure they speak the same language to the database?
If this is even possible with commercial help-desk software.
At my place of employment we use Remedy. It has everything you're looking for; windows client, *nix client and web interface. It can be fairly stable. The server portion runs on solaris (probably other *nixes as well, but never tried it). You can do asset tracking, order tracking, change management, etc... It's also fully customisable.
One recomendation: Stay away from ANYTHING that's Java based. Those have long loading times, are prone to crashing, are slow to use and are generally just a pain in the @ss. I've used some Java applications that choke a 1.4 processor with 512 megs of RAM.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
The part about staying away from anything java based is correct. The state agency I work for uses a program called Service Center for ticket tracking and the such. Sometimes I really think the "Big Chief tablet and #2 pencil system" would work better and faster than that piece of junk. Just thought I'd put my $0.02 in.
Keep Austin Weird!
Don't forget their webbased interface. Works perfectly fine in Galeon.
Rod Taylor
The only way to have a cross-platform help-desk tool, is to access it from a web interface. Discard all non web interface product - but these days all products do provide such web access.
Then you could use a free, opensource product. On the project I'm working on right now we use f2w Helpdesk. We had to install it on a linux Box. We had problems installing the prerequisite on our Solaris box. The software is quite simple to manage, and quite powerfull. Is 100% customisable and can even be accessed from Lynx based browser !!
The product is python and zope based.
none Yet.
Really, Heat is an administrative nightmare. The database is in a constant state of corruption. Upgrades are next to impossible as a result. Our last version jump (6.01 to 6.4) took about 3 months to sort out for only about 50 users. And, we easily spent 5 figures for "support" from Frontrange to get everything working. I can't say the application functions poorly, though, from an end-user perspective. And, it does have lots of features. But, oh it sucks so very much to upgrade.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
Do NOT get SupportMagic.
My company just bought WonderDesk. You can check it out at http://www.wonderdesk.com. It is web based, runs on Windows or *nix and supports MySql (for a little more money) . We are VERY impressed with this product.
PerlDesk seems popular with many web hosting companies for help desk support. It's web based, lot of features and is easy to customize. Unfortunately, it does NOT have asset managment. Only requirements are MySQL, Perl and Sendmail.
Filemaker.
Some packages are for development trouble tickets, some for customer problem tracking, some for both.
Remember to check Bugzilla and SourceForge's tracking tools (I mean SourceForge tracking itself, not just the hosted projects).
Seriously, I doubt that cross-platform capabilities will be a huge issue (a previous post claimed that most serious contenders are cross-platform or at least web based - I reckon it's true...).
In my experience, these beasts come in 2 rough flavours : the "database with a front end" flavour at around the 500 USD mark, and the "help desk, ticketing, workflow, knowledgemanagement, coffee preparation and universe rescuing" flavour, at a price you only find out from the leather-bound ring binder of a fragrant sales representative.
If your company is going for the cheap flavour - pick one, learn to live with it. It will almost certainly not be quite right for you, but you should be able to make it do what you want.
If your company is going for the all-singing, all-dancing flavour, seriously consider whether you need it, and whether it would not be cheaper, easier and less painful to take that wad of currency and insert it into various bodily orifices.
Here's what I have found to be the case : regardless of the promises of the venduh, it will be expensive and difficult to customize the product to meet your needs; you are likely to end up with a kludge.
The "value-added" components will cause more trouble than they solve - I have especially fond memories of an automated inventory application which didn't recognize my ergonomic keyboard and automatically raised helpdesk tickets for the support team to bring me a new keyboard; they religiously turned up every day for about 2 weeks with a newly ordered keyboard...doh.
The more politically active managers will use the data produced by the system to "prove" that one department or another is more expensive/productive/careless/likely to break company policy/set fire to the building than another. The better the reports from the helpdesk system, the more bitter the political battles.
The automatic email reminders will be forwarded to everybody's trash folder because of the false positives; of course, the vital real business-critical problem will not be spotted until the hard drive of the chief exec has been filled with pictures of britney spears, a chicken, and 3 gallons of maple syrup.
In short - with these things, I tend to feel that just a little less than enough is usually more than sufficient. It's a great way to waste enormous amounts of time, money, and credibility when you could be doing stuff for your customers.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.