I have been tasked to take the lead in exploring alternatives to a client's (higher education organization) IT service management platform.
Here are a few questions to get started:
- Which software are you using and how do you find the software? Is it easy to use and customizable? If so, how can we customize it?
- What software did you use before the one you are currently using and did it offer a way to import existing tickets from your old system to your current one?
- What about/How does licensing costs/work? As educational institutions face financial pressures, what are the costs and flexible options for payment?
- Is your software on-premise and cloud/hosted/SaAS models?
- Are you using any other of their modules/product offerings? If so, which ones?
- What is it about the software that you like? What is it that you dislike?
- What is it that you like about their company and support? What is it that you dislike?
- Does your software have asset management (desktop, mobile, app and network), a solutions wiki? a help/chat ticketing system? etc.
- Has anybody used Cherwell? ServiceNow? FrontRange? BMC Track-IT?
Any other feedback, advice, or insights that you can share would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you everyone ... we have select Cherwell as their customer service seems to be on top of things... Will post a review soon enough
www.quora.com/Help-Desk-Software/What-are-the-most-innovative-and-fundamental-features-to-look-for-in-help-desk-software
The article linked above helps people select a help desk software based on the parameters suggested.
You can also try Happyfox, an online centralized ticket management software hosted on the cloud. It has light and clear pricing and leanest learning curve. Please check the set-up steps here. www.happyfox.com/setting-up-a-help-desk-software/
Hult Internation Business school is currently using our help desk software. www.happyfox.com/solution/school-help-desk-application.
Happyfox does provide special discounts for education institutions and please contact me for more information.
Hi Lawrence, I think you are opensource guy, so you may check it out
OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. It is distributed under the GNU AFFERO General Public License (AGPL) and tested on Linux, Solaris, AIX, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS 10.x. Do you receive many e-mails and want to answer them with a team of agents? You're going to love OTRS!
github.com/OTRS/otrs and try below release
www.otrs.com/try/
1. Which software are you using and how do you find the software? Service Now, very useful. Is it easy to use and customizable? Yes. If so, how can we customize it? Forms, fields are easy to setup; business rules – java scripts, api.
2. What software did you use before the one you are currently using and did it offer a way to import existing tickets from your old system to your current one? CA and BMC. We did not import old tickets into the current systems. We imported assets. Change, Incidents, Request start from fresh. Old data was exported and kept as retention.
3. What about/How does licensing costs/work? Only IT roles are payable. As educational institutions face financial pressures, what are the costs and flexible options for payment? Cloud based subscription – based on usage.
4. Is your software on-premise and cloud/hosted/SaAS models? SAAS
5. Are you using any other of their modules/product offerings? If so, which ones? Catalog, Service Desk – incidents, problem, request, Change, Asset, CMDB, Discovery, KB, SDLC
6. What is it about the software that you like? Easy to use What is it that you dislike? Ease of version upgrades are managed but require testing for many hotfixes, some issues are moved to enhancement request within the platform and needs to move to the next version for resolution. Reporting is not as good for trending etc. However, OOB reports can be easily created with existing views. More scripting solutions should be made available to provide greater functionality.
7. What is it that you like about their company and support? Have timezone support with ease of ticket creation. What is it that you dislike? Some problems moved as next release enhancements; manual creation of MIBS / updates for discovery creation of correct models. No able to detect stack switches out of the box
8. Does your software have asset management (desktop, mobile, app and network), a solutions wiki? a help/chat ticketing system? etc. ITAM yes but has not moved onto SAM. Mobile not captured; workstations, servers, applications, business services, network are captured. Service Now discovery is very good as it is agentless but still need to be tweak to ensure proper creation especially on newer equipment and stack switches.
9. Has anybody used Cherwell? ServiceNow? FrontRange? BMC Track-IT? Service Now
Hi Lawrence. I work at Agiloft, and we use our own Service Desk solution. We have several customers successfully using Agiloft for higher education IT service management, including Texas A&M and Cal Poly.
Agiloft is completely customizable with no coding required - all customization is done using an easy drag-and-drop GUI. It's available as both an on-premise solution and SaaS, and includes modules for Asset Management, Customer Support, Integrated Chat, and more, with no additional per-module cost.
You can learn more at www.agiloft.com, or google "Agiloft reviews" to find plenty of thorough, 5-star reviews of our product, including several from our higher education customers. Hope this helps! Good luck!