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."

Comments

Remedy

[ZeroLogic]

Remedy seems to be a standard in this arena. It has a good web client and an ok windows client...

Remedy

[roachmotel3]

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.

Us..

[Xunker]

We (my company, that is) uses this. It's web based totally and extensible with perl.

Re:Us..

[dev0n]

We use RT at my company (I'm the technical support manager at a web hosting company), and we've had no problems. And we're well beyond the 10,000 ticket mark. :)

Even with 40+ people using it at a time, it still holds up just fine.

all of them?

[ealar dlanvuli]

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.

Yes -- X-Platform == Web-based

[4of12]

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.

Bugzilla Works

[Quizme2000]

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.

perfect tracker

[monkeyserver.com]

perfect tracker was okay. It works for helpdesk as well as bug tracking, it is kinda messy to customize, but is pretty feature rich. That is a web-only interface and looks pretty good in linux and windows.
About $600 I think.

avensoft perfect tracker

helpdesks.com

[jspayne]

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

Yes, rt rocks.

[bill_mcgonigle]

rt2 also handles attachments very well, big for user support.

Heat

[NetJunkie]

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

Re:Heat

[KnightStalker]

We used an older version of HEAT where I used to trudge the help desk. I sure hope they've improved it since '97, because it was a truly wretched piece of software then. Non-native widgets with bizarre behavior. Crashed all the time. Constantly corrupted the database (granted, we were using Access). And it was really slow, and not very feature-ful.

Re:Heat

[twilightzero]

The secret of HEAT is that ALL of the interface with the database is done through standard SQL calls. At a place I used to work at, one of our programmers hated the interface so much he created from scratch in about a week a new web interface for it. Everything we wanted on it, nothing we didn't. All it depends on is a preconfigured database (i.e. existing HEAT installation) and a good knowledge of programming :)

Vantive? Use old text based menu helpdesk proggies

[jsimon12]

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.

RT

[jkujawa]

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.

Re:RT

[jkujawa]

(oh, yes. RT is free software.)

Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine.

[Futurepower(R)]

Frontrange has not fixed the bugs in GoldMine. I'm wondering if products from them are viable.

How about, different solutions?

[man_ls]

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.

Re:Vantive? Use old text based menu helpdesk progg

[rtaylor]

Don't forget their webbased interface. Works perfectly fine in Galeon.

Re:Heat - Helpdesk Admin Nightmare

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

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.