Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application
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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.
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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.
No, but not everything needs to be internally hosted, either. ALL decisions should be based on logic and needs evaluation.
PII doesn't make hosted not an option, it actually makes it more important. Because a self hosted tool won't have the security resources of a hosted one. "Like having some control" is the same as saying "we don't think like a business". Nothing wrong with having control, but that's an emotional description. How does "having control", and what does that mean in this case, help the business?
"Liking" approaches is something no business should act on. The moment you feel that you "like" hosted, or on premises, virtual or physical, it should set off a red flag that something is wrong. It's a term people use to express when they are knowingly making a bad decision, but haven't stopped themselves from doing so yet. It's trying to justify a business decision (that must be logical) in terms of consumerism (buying what we like regardless of value.)
None of this is to berate you or to say you can't do it this way. It's the same kind of problem that @WrCombs had and it's best explained this way....
We all have to deal with the emotional whims and non-business illogic of people above us in an organization. What we are required to do is often out of our control. What we do control is repeating false logic as reasons. In this case, stating that you have PII, security, or control concerns aren't valid reasons to chose on premises - they are excuses to cover for someone being emotional. Instead of repeating them, identify that they are false and just say "someone who isn't concerned with business needs above me in the organization demands it be done in this way".
If you say it is a requirement that is out of your control, someone might still point out that it is likely a bad idea, but that's it. If you repeat the false logic, it essentially requires that we point out that the logic is wrong because otherwise we must either act as though we have accepted something false and/or ignore that giving bad advice is not in your interest. We can't honestly try to help while not pointing out when a decision is made on false logic.
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
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.
Sure, but lessso than with Windows
To avoid that, your only real option is getting something in the SaaS vein where that support is someone else's problem. The aforementioned desire of control is what causes the need to do that kind of component support whether Linux, Windows or other.
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
Yeah because self hosted = bad! Seems like a pointless comment and a foolish attitude.
It's a response to "hosted = bad". Neither is good or bad, each has a specific business case and should be evaluated based on the value that it brings to the business, never based on what a company "likes" or an emotional desire. Something like a help desk approaches a "never" on self hosted, simply because of security, performance, support and other factors for a commodity product. Like email it isn't fully a "never", but almost.
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
To those that understand cloud services, its has many more benefits security and infrastructure wise.
That's why the world's most secure orgs tend towards hosted and cloud (more cloud than hosted.) And why we say that self hosting is one of the flags of insecure orgs - emotions and security have no place together. And small businesses tend to have a lot of hubris and self hosting, while not always tied, is often a symptom of small firms favouring the illusion of control over the reality of security. It's like people who prefer to drive than to fly, regardless of the fact that commercial flights are vastly safer - they emotionally favour the illusion and don't logically evaluate their safety.
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
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.
That's a good point. Helpdesk systems are rarely designed for safely storing PII data. And mingling it with loads and loads of non-PII data risks making a security nightmare, too.
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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:
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.
That's a good point. Helpdesk systems are rarely designed for safely storing PII data. And mingling it with loads and loads of non-PII data risks making a security nightmare, too.
Logging would not be up to par with a help desk system, nor would you expect it to be. It's not meant as a place to store sensitive data. If your Helpdesk was breached, you should not lose anything other than internal ip addresses, email addresses, and maybe work phone numbers. None of which give an attacker access.
If you are storing passwords, or even information like DOB or last 6 of social, you are opening yourself up for huge issues.
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@IRJ said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
If you are storing passwords, or even information like DOB or last 6 of social, you are opening yourself up for huge issues.
Would also be super hard to track access inside of the system. Like... people doing support would have to be able to see some odd data. I know that there are different departments here, so maybe one of them is HR?
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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:
If you are storing passwords, or even information like DOB or last 6 of social, you are opening yourself up for huge issues.
Would also be super hard to track access inside of the system. Like... people doing support would have to be able to see some odd data. I know that there are different departments here, so maybe one of them is HR?
Even HR would use a system that has logging designed for sensitive information. Help desks aren't setup to log sensitive information access.
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@Pete-S 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:
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.
Yeah, can't be done for $8K, but if there are a lot of users and the workflow is really critical, going bespoke can pay dividends long term. Sounds scary, but with one dev that knows what they are doing it's pretty manageable for something of this nature.
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@dave247 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:
@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@black3dynamite said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
We use FreshService that's supports SSO but that's about all I know since I don't manage it.
Looks like its I/T focused (not multi-department) and hosted. Those go against my requirements.
Pretty much all good helpdesks are IT focused.
Right and I have trouble determining if they can also be multi-departmental or not.
Most CAN be, but CAN be and "are good at it" don't go together. We use Spiceworks for two departments at one company. It "can" do it, but it is AWFUL. All the departmental stuff goes into one view, always. And you can't search on it. But it's there.
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@black3dynamite said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
We use FreshService that's supports SSO but that's about all I know since I don't manage it.
Looks like its I/T focused (not multi-department), hosted and the price per agent is pretty high for the lowest package. Those go against my requirements. Thanks for the input though.
FreshDesk (not FreshService) has a free tier that might meet your needs. Not sure how it would work with two or more departments, though.
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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...
Zammad is my guess for best option. Not perfect, but probably will do the job.
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@dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I am trialing ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
My biggest issues are mostly around it being slow and clunky. Very hard to use.
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@scottalanmiller 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.
No, but not everything needs to be internally hosted, either. ALL decisions should be based on logic and needs evaluation.
PII doesn't make hosted not an option, it actually makes it more important. Because a self hosted tool won't have the security resources of a hosted one. "Like having some control" is the same as saying "we don't think like a business". Nothing wrong with having control, but that's an emotional description. How does "having control", and what does that mean in this case, help the business?
"Liking" approaches is something no business should act on. The moment you feel that you "like" hosted, or on premises, virtual or physical, it should set off a red flag that something is wrong. It's a term people use to express when they are knowingly making a bad decision, but haven't stopped themselves from doing so yet. It's trying to justify a business decision (that must be logical) in terms of consumerism (buying what we like regardless of value.)
None of this is to berate you or to say you can't do it this way. It's the same kind of problem that @WrCombs had and it's best explained this way....
We all have to deal with the emotional whims and non-business illogic of people above us in an organization. What we are required to do is often out of our control. What we do control is repeating false logic as reasons. In this case, stating that you have PII, security, or control concerns aren't valid reasons to chose on premises - they are excuses to cover for someone being emotional. Instead of repeating them, identify that they are false and just say "someone who isn't concerned with business needs above me in the organization demands it be done in this way".
If you say it is a requirement that is out of your control, someone might still point out that it is likely a bad idea, but that's it. If you repeat the false logic, it essentially requires that we point out that the logic is wrong because otherwise we must either act as though we have accepted something false and/or ignore that giving bad advice is not in your interest. We can't honestly try to help while not pointing out when a decision is made on false logic.
yeah I mean its one of the reasons. We have a lot of hosted services but we want to keep the help desk in house and manage it ourselves, among other things we have going on.
