I know there are other helpdeskers here, so I thought I’d ask about this.
At work (a college), we’re looking for new job-tracking software for our HD, to replace Applix, which is too expensive and is getting far more elaborate than we need. Unfortunately, there are about a million different packages out there, and it’s hard to narrow things down.
What HD software is everybody using? What about features and ease of use?
Any help would be appreciated.
Write your own in FileMaker. Then you can customize it to the way you folks actually work instead of trudging along with some inferior out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution.
Or hire a FileMaker developer to do it for you. I’ll toss one together for you myself for a reasonable price.
Hell, you can use Access as a call tracking database. I’ve designed a few using it. Unlike AHunter, though, you couldn’t pay enough to do it again.
Track-It! by Blue Ocean Software
I know of quite a few major universities that use it with no problems.
Forget Access. It’s not robust enough in a multi-user, university environment. Same for FileMaker. You also will run into serious support and maintenance issues if you try and write it yourself. Are you aware of all the legal crap if you try and write your own HD software for a university? It’s not worth the hassle, especially when there is an abundance of professional, inexpensive HD tools out there.
We use Alexsys at work and it’s pretty good.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll take a look.
A few more details: Our current system pulls user info out of Banner (an Oracle app), and we’d like to have that continue. We use Crystal Reports right now to see what’s happened over the last while. We have programmers for C/C++, Oracle, and Lotus Notes, so any of those would be fine for the customizations we’ll want to do; of course open-source is best for that. Web access would be nice, at least to check on jobs, and to update them if we can. It would also be good if the techs’ job queues could be put on a Palm or other PDA.
Anybody else?
Try the helpdesk function in PHProjekt. Free software in every sense of the word.
Well, I’ve only used one, and it wasn’t my whole job at the time, but I thought that Remedy was pretty good. It had a MySQL backend running on *nix, IIRC, which worked better than some of our all Windows based stuff.
(I think this is the place, but I’m not sure).
It had obviously had a bunch of customizing done to it, but using it was fairly easy. (For troubleshooting, I suppose I was 2nd tier. The place was medium sized I’d say). The only annoying thing about it was that our version was apparently purchased based on the # of people logged in, and whoever was in charge of buying more licences wasn’t on the ball. Sometimes it took 30 minutes to get logged on. 
Forgot to mention:
PHProjekt is a PHP script that can be accessed through apache, and it uses a MySQL database so that you could probably use Crystal to produce your summaries.