Does anyone here run their own in-house IT Ticketing System / Helpdesk Portal?
We are (I am) looking to implement something that is better than what we have now, which is “Send Jason an email”.
I would prefer an Open Source solution, and as cheap (free) as possible. I have been looking into options like Zammad, osTicket, GLPI, FreeScout, etc. Does anyone here have experience with any of these solutions, or perhaps another one that I haven’t mentioned that they want to recommend?
When I came here, I inherited Spiceworks. The good news is that it is free and it works. The bad news is that I think it’s responsible for a lot of the spam that I receive. Maybe it’s not exactly free…
I used the SW Helpdesk way back in the day (I am talking well over 10 years ago), and I remembered that it was ‘lacking’ at best, which is why I didn’t include it.
I haven’t looked at it recently, but maybe I should. I mean, improvements to it have had to have been made in the past decade, right?
Do you have the Case Module? You could always try using that 
. I have no idea what it would take, just a thought.
We used zammad before we were bought. we liked it.
Currently using Azure devops kanban boards linked to a Power Automate flow tied to a group email box. When an Email comes in, it creates a Dev Ops task card.
We use “Web Help Desk” from Solarwinds. Not free, but our IT group is happy with it.
We use Jira ITSM. It’s fine, probably way overkill for small orgs. The cost is per “agent” with no limit on “customers”. Freshdesk has a free version that is no cost per agent.
We use Smartsheet for that here. Seems to work really well and if you know Excel, then the learning curve is pretty rapid.
We use Spiceworks, too. I’m sure there are WAY more sophisticated systems, but it’s hard to beat “free”. Our users can send an email directly to a helpdesk address and the ticket is generated automatically. No doubt that the Spiceworks interface could be better, but it certainly isn’t the biggest drawback to trying to help the users… that would be the fact that most of our users will send something like “I couldn’t enter because I got an error message.” Alrighty then… time to start the 20 questions game!
We use Service Now (just like Epicor)!! Our helpdesk team created a self service portal via this tool so users can put in requests themselves.
Sounds like us…and we’ve got an outsourced MSP.
Same here! They are useless, but we have one.
Ours is hit-or-miss…and it’s probably that way regardless of what MSP you end up with. We’re on our second now.
Not the best answer, but we use the “Planner” app in MS Teams. People make a task in a bucket and add me and themselves to it. Or at least they should be. When people were actually using it, it worked well enough for the number of tasks and issues we had open at a given time, and was easy to use. Most of the time they just email me directly, now.
That’s a creative solution though, I’ll give ya that.
Back in the day I tried to force conditional checks into the SW Helpdesk, requiring them to enter specific key things (like error messages). Talk about an effort in futility.
We’re on our third in-house Ticketing system. Access, then SQL Server backend, now SharePoint List + PowerAutomate.
As often asked on this forum, what business problem are you trying to solve? Yes, email is a terrible tracking system, but it is a good communication tool. Capturing all communication around a ticket is helpful, so a good system will track email communication on the ticket. A good ticket system will separate public conversations from internal.
Tickets are not projects. A ticket to “Upgrade to Kinetic 2024.2” is a request. It should be closed, and the project should be tracked separately. Epicor does this with PRBs and Cases.
A ticket system should recommend Knowlege Base articles to…
prevent more tickets. Discourse here suggests other posts as you type and so would a good ticketing system. If one gets three or more tickets for the same thing, then a KB article should be created.
When I worked somewhere with a “real” ticketing system, we reviewed tickets to make sure none got too old and that some work is being done to move them forward.
While free is cool, be careful. We moved away from Spiceworks because users don’t own any of that data. When the price is zero, your company’s information is the product.
We tried out Trello in the past. We’re already integrating stuff into Trello which makes the accessibility level about as high as possible. Most users are in Trello daily, so a helpdesk board would be two clicks away.
I’m more accessible than that. Everyone reverted to email, or a phone call, or Teams chat, or walking across the office. For now that volume is low enough that demanding adherence to an impersonal ticketing system would be weird.
We’ve got a decent MSP for the basic stuff. The rest is just me and mainly what I need is organizing and prioritizing. I need to know I can pass my work on cleanly. I don’t want to invest into something that’s going to go away or get paywalled sooner or later. Not on someone else’s cloud storage. Shouldn’t depend on special tooling to access.
So I went full caveman nerd and have been using Emacs + org-mode. Makes it really easy to keep myself organized and efficient and on schedule, plus it’s all structured plain text so notepad is enough for someone to figure out what was going on.