Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I've been having trouble actually finding a decent multi-department help desk solution. Google just results in the same old dead-ends. We are a small-ish company with about 60 employees yet we have something like 12 departments or so (always changing) and so our technician quantity is always high (like 40 technicians) and that is what always kills us in price.
Currently, I am trialing ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus which seems to be the best option in terms of functionality and price, but it seems pretty problematic with bugs and weird functional issues. And support doesn't seem that great so far and the community feels kind of dead.
The only other product I found that might work is something called Jitbit help desk but I haven't had a chance to really look into them yet.
Does anyone have any good suggestions?
Here are my requirements:
- Internal, multi-department help desk (not just for I/T)
- 40 technicians / users who can complete requests
- Active Directory integration for SSO
- Price under $8,000/annually
- on-premises deployment
- Microsoft Windows Server based
- dead simple/basic - just need everyone to be able to submit HD requests for different departments and have other people be able to handle and close them. No freaking bells and whistles.
"Dead simple/basic" sounds like you can have something custom made for you. A full stack developer that does both the back-end and front-end could put it together pretty quickly - if you know what you need.
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@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Looks like Zammad does both SSO and Groups (Departments). I don't use it though, so no experience there...
I have this deployed locally. It can be multi-department, but it is, obviously, geared toward IT more then anything else. It can do LDAP and SAML auth and have the ability to integrate with pretty much anything.
It's also stupid easy to install. The big complaint I have at the moment is that some of the customization that I wanted to do needed to be done in the backend.
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Jira is easy to setup for multiple departments. It's not the best ticketing software, but it's inexpensive and very short learning curve. You can also do quite a bit with the api.
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Jira is easy to setup for multiple departments. It's not the best ticketing software, but it's inexpensive and very short learning curve. You can also do quite a bit with the api.
Until you need more than ten people, then it is a little expensive.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Jira is easy to setup for multiple departments. It's not the best ticketing software, but it's inexpensive and very short learning curve. You can also do quite a bit with the api.
Until you need more than ten people, then it is a little expensive.
It's still less than half of his $8k budget for 50 users
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Jira is easy to setup for multiple departments. It's not the best ticketing software, but it's inexpensive and very short learning curve. You can also do quite a bit with the api.
Until you need more than ten people, then it is a little expensive.
It's still less than half of his $8k budget for 50 users
Self hosted (one of his requirements) is $19,000 for 50 agents
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@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements)
Have fun with that!
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
It's still less than half of his $8k budget for 50 users
Sure, but his budget is huge. He can afford Jira in a mode he can't use, but that doesn't make it cheap
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@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements) is $19,000 for 50 agents
That feels crazy high, lol.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
It's still less than half of his $8k budget for 50 users
Sure, but his budget is huge. He can afford Jira in a mode he can't use, but that doesn't make it cheap
Yeah but considering that its hosted and a very simple interface which requires minimal training, it ends up being pretty damn cheap.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements) is $19,000 for 50 agents
That feels crazy high, lol.
Yeah basically they dont want you self hosting lol. If you decide its a requirement for whatever reason, they will penalize you for it.
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements) is $19,000 for 50 agents
That feels crazy high, lol.
Yeah basically they dont want you self hosting lol. If you decide its a requirement for whatever reason, they will penalize you for it.
Yeah, heavily.
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@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Curious about the on-prem requirement? Seems lime an odd requirement?
On-prem because we have a lot of PII information that gets put into our help desks, plus we just like having some control over things. Not everything has to be cloud hosted.
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@coliver said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Looks like Zammad does both SSO and Groups (Departments). I don't use it though, so no experience there...
I have this deployed locally. It can be multi-department, but it is, obviously, geared toward IT more then anything else. It can do LDAP and SAML auth and have the ability to integrate with pretty much anything.
It's also stupid easy to install. The big complaint I have at the moment is that some of the customization that I wanted to do needed to be done in the backend.
That product looks really good and the only reason I'm hesitant is because I don't have a ton of Linux admin experience. I have worked with Linux a bit at school, homes labs and at work and I know my way around (to some small degree) but the one problem I've always had with Linux is that something eventually/always breaks when some application or module or script gets updated. PHP and Apache are working fine today but come in on Tuesday and suddenly nothing is working anymore.
That being said, I will give it a try!
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@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements)
Have fun with that!
Yeah because self hosted = bad! Seems like a pointless comment and a foolish attitude.
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Curious about the on-prem requirement? Seems lime an odd requirement?
On-prem because we have a lot of PII information that gets put into our help desks, plus we just like having some control over things. Not everything has to be cloud hosted.
Oh I see. I didn't realize it would be set up for the general public to have read access if it were cloud hosted.
I suppose all these multi-billion dollar enterprises using hosted services like Service Now have no idea!
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Self hosted (one of his requirements)
Have fun with that!
Yeah because self hosted = bad! Seems like a pointless comment and a foolish attitude.
No I didn't mean it like that. I meant it as in have fun with all the extra work/time/effort/etc that is going to entail versus SaaS.
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@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Curious about the on-prem requirement? Seems lime an odd requirement?
On-prem because we have a lot of PII information that gets put into our help desks, plus we just like having some control over things. Not everything has to be cloud hosted.
Oh I see. I didn't realize it would be set up for the general public to have read access if it were cloud hosted.
I suppose all these multi-billion dollar enterprises using hosted services like Service Now have no idea!
Not quite a full on JB explosion there....
But you're not wrong. The fear of cloud based solutions (not real cloud - just other people's servers) is overblown, etc. Do you need to do your due diligence and make sure that any vendor you pick is up to snuff - sure.. but you should do the same for self hosted stuff too.
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This is the same resistance people had with Virtualization. To those that understand cloud services, its has many more benefits security and infrastructure wise.
The key problem here is proper data management. Why are you storing PII in the help desk? For verification of end users? If that is the case, even if on prem, you should have a better way of making sure that is accessed securely and preferably not stored in a ticketing system.
