Main image

Help Me Rhonda? on help desks…?

16th October
2007
written by mburleson

Goooooooddddd evening blogging land… (in best Robin Williams impersonation)

Well today I started the dwindling down of the Help Desk Software. I had installed OTRS and Spiceworks, but wasn’t completely satisfied.

Step in Church IT Roundtable and Jim Edwards’ recap of Help Desk mentions during the conference.

I have started demos for both ServiceDesk and Kayako. I have to say I like both! The ServiceDesk was easy to install and setup and configure(granted very limited configuration for now). They both seem to handle tickets and email capturing very well. There are a few things I wish were combined from the two..

ServiceDesk Plus Pro

  • Easy Active Directory Integration
  • Asset Management + User Attachment of Assets
  • Purchase Ordering Managment

Kayako

  • Web Portal – Don’t have to authenticate to view KB or Troubleshooting
  • Predefined Templates for replies
  • Live Chat ability

My thoughts are that Kayako would be great for external facing sites and users while ServiceDesk would be good for internal use, though I wish it had the predefined replies and easy-linkable KB articles.

More testing tomorrow.

Tags: , , ,
Uncategorized

2 Comments

  1. Ashish
    18/10/2007

    Hi Mark

    This is Ashish from the ServiceDesk Plus team. Thank you for including us in your trials.

    If you are looking for an external facing solution, you can try our SupportCenter Plus (www.supportcenterplus.com).

    In ServiceDesk Plus, you can attach an article from the KB into your reply by
    - First, configuring the email template for “replying to a request” to also include “Resolution”.
    - Second, entering the “Resolution” for a request.
    - Third, when you hit “Reply”, the resolution will automatically be pre-entered in your reply.

    If you would like me to demonstrate this or the whole product, I will be happy to.

    We will also be including the Live Chat feature in one of our future releases.

    Thanks again.
    Ashish

  2. David Szpunar
    23/10/2007

    If you test HelpSpot I’d be interested in hearing what your experiences are. We’re the only church I can remember off the top of my head (not that that’s saying much) that is using HelpSpot, so the perspective of another Church IT person would be nice!

Leave a Reply