In the market for a Service Desk system (again)

[Dieselboy]

So after the failed attempt by a well-known vendor and their chosen parter to install their product and considerable amount of time later, we're back in the market for a service desk system.

What are you guys using? What can you recommend? Any gripes with what you currently have even though it might be the best fit?

I thought our requirements were simple, but the current product we have was implemented wrong from the beginning which has caused us an immense amount of issues later down the line. Our first requirement was that the system should support all current customers of ours and allow us to add more customers in the future. However, the way in which it has been implemented completely prevents us from adding additional customers. Even adding another person from an existing customer to the system is near impossible (they cannot see previous tickets closed or any existing tickets, plus other access issues. The fix was to go to each ticket and assign the new user as a customer contact to the ticket - messy messy messy)

• should support multiple customers
• should involve ITIL practices/processes
• helpdesk / servicedesk (eg.incident/problem/request), change management etc
• should allow customisation(s)
• On-premise deployment

I think the last item is the difficult one, there seems to be a lot of cloud products available.

[wintermute000]

what could possibly go wrong with a cloud based system to track network issues.

Though to be fair, most SaaS vendors run screaming from on-prem, unless its entirely customer managed or a gigantic customer who can be gouged, for obvious reasons


If its for the benefit of external facing customers, there could be value (and savings) in cloud based.


Minor quibble: I do a lot of scoping work and from my reading of your requirements, your use of the word 'should' is incorrect - sounds like 'must' i.e. mandatory.


Nail down your requirements this time using what you've learnt and you should not have any issues with the product the second time round (since what  you pick MUST support all your mandatory requirements).

[icecream-guy]

BMC Remedy, use it here, but it ain't cheap.

or did I just guess the "well known vendor"?

[Nerm]

The last company I worked for used freshdesk.com which is now freshservice.com. It is cloud based only so wouldn't meet your on-premise requirement, but it was a really good product. Where I am now they use ManageEngine of which I am not a big fan. I probably would like it if I hadn't used the freshdesk products first. The ManageEngine offering just seems so "from the 90's" in comparison to the freshdesk offerings.

[deanwebb]

BMC Remedy here, but I only use it to close tickets and to request services. If there's a way to use it as a knowledge base, it's either unknown, non-intuitive, or not currently implemented. We have a lot of shadow IT as regards getting things fixed...

[icecream-guy]

BMC Remedy here, but I only use it to close tickets and to request services. If there's a way to use it as a knowledge base, it's either unknown, non-intuitive, or not currently implemented. We have a lot of shadow IT as regards getting things fixed...

with the history of tickets, the knowledge base is built up,  typically one would document the tickets as to the solution before closing, and when a similar problem comes around again another one would search old tickets and find the solution. Though searching Remedy is like finding a needle in a desert.

[icecream-guy]

could check out Liberum Help Desk?  it's free, open-sourced, and any featured it doesn't have, you (personally) can write the code and add the feature.

[Dieselboy]

BMC Remedy, use it here, but it ain't cheap.

or did I just guess the "well known vendor"?

Almost, actually. I think if we went the Remedy route we would have been okay except we went with their smaller product where the code was rewritten in v12 and just gave us a whole heap of problems. With that and the incorrect implementation it has left us in the crapper as a customer. Their partner not really knowing anything about a) the product and b) unix-like OS where the application was installed. I have LOTS of emails where their partner has said they dont know if they can do; or how to do our requirement for the previous two reasons.

Minor quibble: I do a lot of scoping work and from my reading of your requirements, your use of the word 'should' is incorrect - sounds like 'must' i.e. mandatory.

There are two meanings for the word should and I meant it as a "must"

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I really think a cloud offering would be the easiest way forward. Our company has around 45 people world-wide so we're not exactly big.