Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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:
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.
I'm def going to check it out!
-
@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:
I am trialing ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
My biggest issues are mostly around it being slow and clunky. Very hard to use.
It actually seems pretty easy but the UI is a bit clunky for the technicians and I've run into several stupid forms issues. I will probably not go with them.
-
@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:
@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.
I'm def going to check it out!
At a minimum, worth a look see.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@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.
Hey I need a new gig, got to get away from 100 hour weeks. But yeah, you're not getting a polished product for 8K
-
We've just starting using JitBit. They took the full on prem with access to source so one of the programmers has been tweaking things. I'm not a huge fan but it seems to be working.
I can't say anything bad about GLPI but it might be more than what the OP is looking for.
Request Tracker provides a massive framework to play with for ticketing and such, I'm 90% sure that one of my former gigs was using it with some minor rebranding but it is really one of those situations where the sky's the limit on what it seems to be able to do.
-
@notverypunny said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
We've just starting using JitBit. They took the full on prem with access to source so one of the programmers has been tweaking things. I'm not a huge fan but it seems to be working.
I can't say anything bad about GLPI but it might be more than what the OP is looking for.
Request Tracker provides a massive framework to play with for ticketing and such, I'm 90% sure that one of my former gigs was using it with some minor rebranding but it is really one of those situations where the sky's the limit on what it seems to be able to do.
You guys started using JitBit on-premises? What don't you like about it? I've only been evaluating it for a few hours but it seems pretty simple and might do the job for us since we really only need something basic for multi-departmental help desk tickets.
-
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
-
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
Not one that I've heard of before.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
Not one that I've heard of before.
There were quite a few that were there that I'd not heard of. This my first interaction with them. They've been around for quite awhile. It may be that they're more well known in the European market since they're based in the Netherlands.
-
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
We abandoned on-premesis TopDesk in favour of hosted FreshService.
Mind you, we had a really old version but there are basic things that it simply cannot do. Prime example: Merge tickets.We had a conference call to a sales rep and they "couldn't decide on how the merged ticket would look." Basically the explanation was something like: Would the more recent ticket take priority or the older one?
You CAN merge archived tickets though.I sent my shopping list to their rep that we were on the call to but never heard back. I think he may have been emabarressed by what they couldn't achieve on it.
-
@Kelly 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:
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
Not one that I've heard of before.
There were quite a few that were there that I'd not heard of. This my first interaction with them. They've been around for quite awhile. It may be that they're more well known in the European market since they're based in the Netherlands.
Their back end for the hosted system is written in Dutch but they do provide some kind of translation ($Dutch_word = $English_word) so you can poke about. Also, they (TopDesk) must do the software upgrades (logging in remotely and doing the work). Not your team.
They also now have a SaaS version but that's not one of the OP's requirements we couldnn't get away fast enough.
(I inherited workig with it).
-
@nadnerB said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
Not one that I've heard of before.
There were quite a few that were there that I'd not heard of. This my first interaction with them. They've been around for quite awhile. It may be that they're more well known in the European market since they're based in the Netherlands.
Their back end for the hosted system is written in Dutch but they do provide some kind of translation ($Dutch_word = $English_word) so you can poke about. Also, they (TopDesk) must do the software upgrades (logging in remotely and doing the work). Not your team.
They also now have a SaaS version but that's not one of the OP's requirements we couldnn't get away fast enough.
(I inherited workig with it).
@nadnerB Are these issues that linger with the current version, or not? It would definitely remove them from the running if they persist.
-
@dave247
Maybe I got spoiled on my first couple of ticket system experiences, but they were more or less annexes or complimentary to CRM / ERP systems, so you had an client centric / customer-centric view of the situation as well as the user's history... JitBit, or at least the way that we've got it set up doesn't associate the ticket to users or assets / equipment so it's not readily apparent if the problem is with the user, the HW or something else -
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@nadnerB said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
@Kelly 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:
@Kelly said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:
I was just talking to some vendors about this at a conference recently (yesterday). One of the ones that really caught my eye was TopDesk. I don't know if they support on-premises deployment or not, but I think the others might check the right boxes. I have no idea on pricing, but I believe they were the ones that do their licensing based on FTE count (due to having a broader focus than just ITSM).
Not one that I've heard of before.
There were quite a few that were there that I'd not heard of. This my first interaction with them. They've been around for quite awhile. It may be that they're more well known in the European market since they're based in the Netherlands.
Their back end for the hosted system is written in Dutch but they do provide some kind of translation ($Dutch_word = $English_word) so you can poke about. Also, they (TopDesk) must do the software upgrades (logging in remotely and doing the work). Not your team.
They also now have a SaaS version but that's not one of the OP's requirements we couldnn't get away fast enough.
(I inherited workig with it).
@nadnerB Are these issues that linger with the current version, or not? It would definitely remove them from the running if they persist.
From what I've seen of the new version, it's just an upgrade to what we had. They don't appear to have made any drastic changes, just GUI, and maybe a few "catch up features"... cue the Jurassic Park Effect thoughts.
Points of note:
- Their customer portal is locked away, so you have to be a customer first before seeing anything in their walled off community.
- No backgrond automations
- Ticket visibility was a huge issue
- Lacked basic functions of modern helpdesks
The good things of the on-premesis install
- We had unlimited agents
- Can be set up for multiple departments (which we had but that department bailed and followed us to FreshService)
I found that there was a specific way of thinking to operate it and there was little flexibility (one way to do things), settings were buried and difficult to find. Granted our setup had been poorly managed for years but the sales guy couldn't convince us that there had been dramatic changes since the last upgrade (several years), or that they could meet all our "Have to have's"/Deal breakers
