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shaq_mobile
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IT ticketing software

Wed Oct 04, 2017 9:53 pm

Does anyone have anything they are happy with in their workplace? We have folks using team dynamix and they don't like it at all. It's more of a project manager solution with ticketing on the side. We are looking to pilot a new system that will work well across campus but the only one I've heard good things about is fresh service.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Wed Oct 04, 2017 10:04 pm

We use ConnectWise, but we are an outsourced IT provider. It has a lot of features you wouldn't use, but it's the gold standard for IT providers.
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shaq_mobile
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 12:33 am

Is there an API for ticket creation? Does it interface with hangouts, email, or slack? Is there any sms functionality?
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 12:54 am

I've seen Spiceworks and some others, but honestly the slickest I've seen by far is always heavily customized or done in-house. :-/
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 12:59 am

Yeah I think we are trying to avoid a homebaked or open source solution. In the past, when people move on it becomes an issue. Documentation is also tough to keep up to date.

I don't know if it's totally out of the question, but I think they want to go with a pre built solution that would work across multiple colleges.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 2:33 am

We used SmarterTrack years ago, but the price kept creeping up. We are currently using iSupport. It's very full featured, but it's not the most intuitive to setup. It's based around ITIL standards.

I haven't personally used it, but I've heard that Microsoft System Center Service Manager is supposed to be good. You mentioned "campus"...do you work in education? I know some business call their locations campuses as well...that's why I asked.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:04 am

I know you said you prefer a commercial solution, but Mantis may be worth a look. I've used (and helped maintain) it at a previous workplace. It's designed to be more of a bug tracker than an IT ticketing system per se, but there's a lot of overlap between those two problem domains, and Mantis is very flexible.

It does integrate with e-mail, and it looks like there's a plugin for Slack integration.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:55 am

shaq_mobile wrote:
Yeah I think we are trying to avoid a homebaked or open source solution. In the past, when people move on it becomes an issue. Documentation is also tough to keep up to date.

I don't know if it's totally out of the question, but I think they want to go with a pre built solution that would work across multiple colleges.


Just because something is open source doesn't mean there isn't a paid support option. Seems crazy to rule stuff out because it's possible to get it for free.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 11:43 am

Spiceworks works pretty good for us.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Thu Oct 05, 2017 12:48 pm

The problem with ticketing software is 99% of the people writing the software have never used ticketing software to write tickets. (in the real world)

The flows into "the problem with 99% of CTO's is none of them have touch technology outside of a management role"...

and so it goes.... :D
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 9:53 am

shaq_mobile wrote:
Is there an API for ticket creation? Does it interface with hangouts, email, or slack? Is there any sms functionality?

There is an API for ticket creation, among other things. It integrates with the different RMM tools as well. There's also a tight integration to ScreenConnect and LabTech directly because they absorbed them.

Not sure about hangouts, and I remember one of our fellow providers in another area had Slack integrated, but I don't know if that was a custom thing or not. SMS and email are the same for the system, you just send it through the [email protected] method for texting.

Here are their official integration partners: https://marketplace.connectwise.com/c/1 ... n-partners

There are of course unofficial ones too. CW is very good about making their system easy to integrate with.

Aranarth wrote:
The problem with ticketing software is 99% of the people writing the software have never used ticketing software to write tickets. (in the real world)

The flows into "the problem with 99% of CTO's is none of them have touch technology outside of a management role"...

and so it goes.... :D

That was the nice thing about CW for us. It was created by an IT company. I've heard of in-house IT using it, but most of the in-house IT I've worked with tend to do things the hard way and create a custom albatross necklace. It's like they enjoy spending their time with the busy work of maintaining tool sets than actually fixing client issues... The others tend to use Spiceworks because of price, but they are very different products and focus on different things.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:14 am

I currently use Jira at work. I like it quite a bit because you can tie it into Slack and get notifications there. Pretty easy to setup your own workflow and overall easy to use. Recommended.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 11:20 am

Our IT uses Cherwell Service Management. I'm not fond of it from the user-end, but no idea how it works on their end.
gecko575 wrote:
I currently use Jira at work. I like it quite a bit because you can tie it into Slack and get notifications there. Pretty easy to setup your own workflow and overall easy to use. Recommended.

We use Jira on the production side for our unit tracking workflow. It works pretty well, but we've barely scratched the surface of functionality.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 12:20 pm

Thank you for all the responses!

We haven't *totally* ruled out open source, I think we are just hesitant. It's mainly a concern regarding supporting functionality when people come and go. Eventually, we want to role the solution out campus wide, which makes the idea of having lots of custom solutions (and unavoidable lack of documentation to support it) undesirable. So the price is obviously a plus, we are just worried about... ending up in the situation we are now, where we end up dividing campus up again with solutions that don't play nice together or are no longer supported.

I've heard good things about Jira. We use Slack and it's worked well for keeping cross campus communication going. It would be nice to see things that integrate with that.

Yeah i work at a large university. I work in the engineering college which is the largest.

Basically, we have one large IT group for campus (which supports the colleges or departments that are too small to have their own IT), then there are about four separate IT groups for the larger colleges. The large IT group wants to push Team Dynamix, but no one in that group actually likes it and the project manager for it actually actively told me to not adopt it. I think it's just an initiative the leadership there is pushing to boost their resume or something. So the rest of us on campus are trying to search for a better solution that could scale across campus, but still be cleanly divided between colleges. Remedy was pretty good at that, but Remedy is a monster and felt ultra corporate. We try really hard to not let our folks feel like their another brick in the wall (they all know our desk numbers/offices/cell numbers and are encouraged to contact us directly and the main support portal is just an email address that support has access to).
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 12:31 pm

I'll throw my hat in the ring for Jira. I work at a small University and we switched from SNOW (Service NOW) a few months back. I wasn't here for the transition but literally every person I've talked to says Jira is better, and that includes end users. The workflows make sense, the comment system is great, integration with Confluence is also very nice (both being Atlassian products) and the dashboards are very handy, and very customizable. I don't know if it's the best ticketing software on the planet because I haven't tried every single one (I have used Spiceworks as well as a couple custom programs) but it has to be one of the best.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 2:36 pm

Roll your own, the only way to get something good. Granted you have to be big enough to have devs and management with a clue to allow it to even get off the ground.

Not in the helpdesk realm but similar problem with tracking similar-ish things, all the COTS stuff is trash, and even the big name multi-million solutions are awful.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri Oct 06, 2017 9:32 pm

I'll throw a hat in for Jira, its nice, and if you want a hosted managed service instead, I've been using ServiceNow for about the last 5 years at various clients, also works quite well, and is also adaptable if you should need it. The problem with as you can read above is that SNOW can be cumbersome unless you know what you want to do. But I would say for a larger org, SNOW can be made to work better, while for smaller orgs, Jira is likely better. Depends on how much time you want to put in to the tool as well.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Sat Oct 07, 2017 2:21 am

AutoTask is lovely. You can ticket, manage machines, track time, setup calendars, and a lot more.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Sat Oct 07, 2017 2:37 am

shaq_mobile wrote:
Yeah i work at a large university.


So I asked that question because the Microsoft license costs for education are cheap. In fact, I would be surprised if your agreement doesn't already include licenses for System Center Datacenter...which includes all of the System Center products. Point being, if you already have a license for it, it's worth doing a quick install of System Center Service Manager on a VM to give it a look. And a bonus, the System Center licenses also include the SQL license required for the database(s).


We're sticking with iSupport because we got a really sweet deal on the pricing. We don't pay anywhere close to the retail cost, but that took a conversation with their founder and CEO. Essentially, he wanted our business and wanted to help out a small Community College so he discounted it down to what we were paying for our previous product, before the massive price hike they were imposing for our renewal.

As for the product, it works well. We probably don't even use 50% of the functionality because we're only using it for incident tracking. Why didn't we use System Center Service Manager? Because we have other non-IT areas on campus that also use the system, and Service Manager is really geared more towards IT support. As far as a customer is concerned, submitting a ticket is as simple as sending an email to a specified email address. We route it and categorize it, and we can even route it between departments if we need to (for example, between IT and the Physical Plant). It does have a web portal where the customer--whether that's a student, faculty, or staff--can input the ticket and select the category up front, but we end up changing the category half the time anyway. Our preferred method is for them to just email into the system.

For those of you who have mentioned Slack integration, iSupport also has that. As well as Bomgar and Social Media integration (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). And it has an asset tracking feature, cost centers and job functions, etc.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri May 11, 2018 2:03 pm

Aphasia wrote:
I'll throw a hat in for Jira, its nice, and if you want a hosted managed service instead, I've been using ServiceNow for about the last 5 years at various clients, also works quite well, and is also adaptable if you should need it. The problem with as you can read above is that SNOW can be cumbersome unless you know what you want to do. But I would say for a larger org, SNOW can be made to work better, while for smaller orgs, Jira is likely better. Depends on how much time you want to put in to the tool as well.

I used to make jokes about Jira but it's honestly not too bad. We're just using the development side of it, though. I haven't used anything else in a long time since we're basically all Jira all the time, but it does nicely.

Our support department uses Microsoft CRM, and the support staff seems to hate it. It interfaces with Jira but I don't know if that's because the org customized it or if it's because Microsoft has put the work in.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri May 11, 2018 3:14 pm

ServiceNow with customized template and graphics for responses back to end users and a customized front-end on the portal for end users to submit tickets and check their status.
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Re: IT ticketing software

Fri May 11, 2018 7:22 pm

Jira is OK, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's good though. It has crappy search, the way you move between boards / backlog / sprints etc is not exactly what I'd call intuitive. There's lot of little things that really should be better. I'd say with heavy customization it can be relatively good (which is basically simplifying the interface by narrowing it down to the important parts). These systems tend to try to do everything for everyone which is what makes them cumbersome out of the box.
 
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Re: IT ticketing software

Sat May 12, 2018 7:19 am

I use Request Tracker at my work.

We use it to manage customer service emails, but it is used by CPAN for their issue tracking.

It works via email primarily, but can be extended with custom modules or using the REST API.
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