Technobabble

Help Desk Software Review

Posted by on Jan 6, 2007 | 23 Comments

Looking for Help Desk software? After tackling the topic a number of times, I turned up a new resource outside of the gnomieverse a few weeks back. Greg Bulmash has penned a nice review on finding the right help desk ticket solution. With a new site almost ready to launch, Greg needed to have a help desk system in place to handle an influx of user issues.

After looking at handful of help desk solutions – including Cerberus Helpdesk, Liveperson, and Hesk – Greg chose osTicket Community Version, largely due to its e-mail integration. Less technical folks might be put off by the complexity of the install.

Greg writes, “if you have a decent working knowledge of Perl, PHP, cPanel, and MySQL, and you make sure to *read* the instructions, you can have the basic system up and running 20 minutes after downloading it.”

Score one for real world reviews!

[tags]help desk software[/tags]

  • http://www.userscape.com/blog/ Ian Landsman

    Nice little post. I thought I’d share a link to the help desk software my company builds. I’d love to have you guys do a review on it sometime.

    HelpSpot Help Desk Software

  • Paul

    back in the last week of december there was a small program featured in lockergnome, it was to let you change teh colors of your folders to color code them well I have lsot that issue and cant’ find that program I had to reformat my system, can you PLEASE send me the web page of that program please.
    Paul

  • http://livetime.com/webservicedesk/Press290107.html Bill Gram-Reefer

    See LiveTime news

    - http://livetime.com/webservicedesk/Press290107.html

    as it releases LiveTime Express that brings value and performance plus ITIL best practices to the SMB/SME help desk market that compares more than favorably to competing offerings…for instance, the CMDB is included!

  • http://www.cromosoft.com Ramiro

    Hello Dan,

    Finding the right helpdesk ticket solution isn’t an easy job, when there are hundred of solutions, a help desk is the alternative when there are a lot of questions,emails per month and having history of visitors is important.

    I was with the same problem, once again my solution was to create my own tickets system, with basic and few advanced options, after of hundred of hours programming and fixing bugs was ready Facil HelpDesk because doing software is an art and depends of our requirements.

  • http://www.helpdesknotes.com Linda Marie

    Hi,

    I am working on a series of articles right now that go over all of the features of all the most recently updated help desk software. Those articles can be found here: http://www.helpdesknotes.com/software_tools/

    I hope this helps to build on your resources.

    Thx,

    Linda Marie

  • Sam

    Hi Dan,

    I was evaluating a few help desk software solutions for a friend’s online business. I was amazed (and a bit confused) to find over 50 vendors when I tried to look for options.

    I was told about this new startup in silicon valley which offers a free web-based solution.

    Have you heard of Pathworks Software (www.pathworkssoftware.com)?

    It would really help if you could compare them with a few leading help desk vendors.

    Thanks,

    Sameer

  • Philip Morrison

    Nice one. Do you know about BridgeTrak ? We’ve been using it successfully for a long time. Loving the feature set – it’s exactly what our company needs. Even better, they were just bought by one of my favorite companies- scriptlogic – so we can expect even more great enhancements. Hope this was useful!

  • http://www.helpdesknotes.com Linda Marie

    I did a review of the features for pathworks. You can find it here: http://www.helpdesknotes.com/2007/12/help_desk_software_review_path.html

    The only to do a true review on pathworks myself would be to setup a real help desk with the software and use it for at least a month. Since I cannot afford to put my team through that kind of torture on a regular basis, I do a review of the features, and I link to all of the reviews I can find on the internet. To me it is more valuable to see what multiple help desks have to say about the software. You get a broader scope that way. I only found one review for pathworks, but you can compare it to all of the other software on this page. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page. This list of links grows all the time.

  • http://joe@bigwebmaster.com Joe Fields

    I tried os commerce and thought it was missing a lot of required features, I went with http://www.omnistarlive.com and I have been happy with it. It is easy to use and has many great features. These days there are so many good vendors out there, but you have to be careful to go with a company that has good support.

  • William

    You should also take a look at I’m OnCall – http://www.imoncall.com – I’ve used it in the past with some success.

  • http://www.webhelpdesk.com THE Help Desk Software

    Cheers Dan for all the useful info. We are a 20 technician shop at a non-profit edu. We tested a few other “up-ity” solutions too. Hope this helps your readers!

    We tested Parature. Brilliant features, nice UI! We didn’t go with it because it was Hosted only and we have the infrastructure to host it in-house. Thus, we wanted avoid gia-normous annual renewal fees. :(

    We tested Footprints too. It could do anything in the world but seemed to be overkill and difficult to set up. Too many consultants needed to set it up ;)

    Another product that you didn’t mention is Service-Now. We tested it out. It is ITIL heaven, if that’s your thing. Hosted only, so we opted out. Well, they opted us out…they had something like a 40-50 technician minimum. Ouch! :(

    Sooo…after months of frustration…and testing the “freebies”, which I won’t get started on (readers: if you are just starting out your help desk software search, caveat: there are HUNDREDS!), I had a colleague in higher ed recommend the Web Help Desk Software.

    We couldn’t be happier. Right price, easy to configure, and features, features, features! :) Finally!

    Hope this helps with everyone’s daunting task of finding a help desk solution. What a hassle! :-\

    Regards,
    Paul

  • http://webhost.uk.net Sam

    A new buzz in helpdesk market and its hot — it’s Vision Helpdesk ( http://www.thevisionworld.com )– A true multi domain helpdesk software, it includes but not limited to SLA, Escalation, Report Generation, Php-Ajax based fast user interface, Downloads, Knowledgebase, clients can reply to tickets from their favorite email client, private messaging and scrap book, multi-langauge, themes available and much more… I hope this will help users..

  • sysadmin

    My god, out of all the vendors of helpdesk software, ALL OF THEM are missing the mark!

    Vision Helpdesk, Cerberus, every one in this thread, they are all bloated, over-complicated softwares that seem to lack any REAL DESIGNERS behind them.

    Not to mention even if you find one half-way decent, it is zend or ion-encoded, meaning you are at the utter mercy of the vendor if you choose to use it. While I understand the need to protect the code, I really am tired of putting aspects of my business in these random vendors out there. They all seem nice and flowery until after purchase, then its all downhill from there.

    So for all you vendors reading these comments – hire some proper GUI designers and PLAN your interface out. Don’t let your programmers run the show – they really SUCK at developing intuitive, aesthetic interfaces.

  • Ian Roberts

    Less bloated, less complicated, nice ui and features http://www.drsoft.com/p/Ticket_system-24.html

  • http://webhost.uk.net Sam

    We are strongly considering Vision Helpdesk, They have recently launched Version 2 beta and online demo is available at http://www.thevisionworld.com/vision-helpdesk/online-demo

    They claim V2 is 10 times faster than any available web-based helpdesk since its completely developed in Ajax system.

    I hate Cerberus due to its lack of design and user friendliness.

  • http://Infrenion.com Infre

    Dan, Thank you for this post! Good Help.

    We Migarted away from Kayako to Vision Helpdesk.

    Thought I should pass on word, They are running great refugee discount offer vision helpdesk owned license @ $49.99

    http://www.thevisionworld.com

  • Raman

    I found this good comparison chart for Vision Helpdesk, Kayako Helpdesk and Cerberus

    http://helpdeskarticles.com/compare-helpdesk-kayako-vs-vision-vs-cerberus.html

  • http://codesmithtools.com Blake Niemyjski

    We use CodeSmith Insight (http://www.codesmithtools.com/product/insight), which is very easy to use for email based collaboration as well as exception management.

  • Hoetsie

    no sign of usb or sd card slots ?

  • Terabytetron

    They didn’t mention how much ram ipad2 has. ;

  • Jon

    sweet!!!

  • JonathanPDX

    “seperate”?

    Well, it’s a start. Only 1 more year to go to decide whether I want one or not.
    The addition of cameras is a step in the right direction!

  • thegroomer

    should i sell my original ipad or will it be good enough still