Help Desk Software

With IT budgets cut to the bone, Help desk administrators are scrambling to find more efficient ways to provide technical support. Help desk software vendors have seen the light: The current crop of products offers improved customization and integration and new capabilities that can reduce your workload while increasing end-user satisfaction. If you haven't updated your Help desk software in the past few years, you might find that some of the new features justify investing in an up-to-date product.

Help Comes in All Sizes
Help desk software capabilities range from basic small-business call-tracking tools that provide trouble ticketing and reporting to feature-rich, highly scalable enterprise solutions that offer tight integration with your network and systems management tools and the flexibility to adapt to almost any business process. Basic products typically cost from $1000 to $10,000, depending on features and the number of licenses needed. For products in this price range, vendors often make available separate modules that provide PC discovery, inventory, change management, remote control capabilities, browser-based access, or other functions. Some entry-level products also provide a knowledge base to help analysts and technicians resolve problems.

Unlike large-enterprise products, which can take weeks or months to install and customize (at an extra cost if the vendor does the installation), basic products are typically easy to get up and running and have a gentle learning curve. However, many of these products use proprietary and sometimes less robust databases rather than open relational databases, so they might not be able to handle the call volume of more expensive products. Basic products also are likely to be less customizable than are products that are designed for larger enterprises.

Between the small-business Help desk software packages and enterprise support-center products are several offerings suited to midsized Help desks or to small installations that expect to grow. Selling for $5000 to $100,000 (depending on features and the number of Help desk analysts and technicians that need access to the software), most products in this category allow a fair amount of customization, support the most commonly used relational database products, and include knowledge bases. Figure 1, page 70, shows the screen that a technician can use to add a new problem resolution to the knowledge base for GWI Software's c.Support for .NET product (pricing for this product wasn't set at press time). Like their enterprise cousins, midrange products typically provide automatic trouble-ticket escalation and notification capabilities, making them suitable for multi-tiered support environments in which problems are delegated to specialized workgroups.

Both midrange and enterprise-class products usually provide proactive management of service level agreements (SLAs). Typically, when a support call comes in from an end user or department governed by an SLA, the software alerts the analyst to the call and to the action that the SLA specifies should be taken. After the trouble ticket is generated and assigned to a technician, the Help desk software alerts the technician if the ticket isn't closed out as the deadline specified in the SLA approaches. As in basic products, some components, such as SLA support, asset management, or change management, might be optional in midrange products.

More than 30 Help desk products run on Windows 2000 or Windows NT. I don't have room to discuss that many products, so I limit my discussion to a handful of major vendors that together supply most installations. In enterprise support centers, Computer Associates' (CA's) Unicenter Service Desk and Peregrine Systems' Remedy Help Desk and ServiceCenter products have large installed bases. In small or midsized installations, Magic Solutions' Magic Total Service Desk Suite, Front Range Solutions' HelpDesk Expert Automation Tool (HEAT), UniPress Software's FootPrints and FootPrints for Exchange, and Blue Ocean Software's Track-It! and Track-It! Enterprise Edition are popular. These products employ a client/server architecture, which in the past required a client to be installed on the Help desk analyst's desktop. But the trend now is toward products that Help desk analysts can access with a Web browser (a Web server—typically Microsoft IIS—must be installed on the network). All but the most basic products support common open relational databases (typically Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle8, or Oracle9i), but the customer typically must supply the database software.

Integrated Assessment and Customization
Gathering detailed information about the user's hardware and software configuration and problem is crucial to smooth Help desk operations. But a lengthy information-gathering process for each call creates long call queues and frustrates both users and analysts. In the past, analysts needed to gather and enter a lot of information: Even when companies had asset-management software in place, the Help desk software couldn't access that inventory information. Now, most Help desk products can integrate with standalone asset-management products and enterprise frameworks, and many provide inventory and audit modules for companies that haven't invested in that technology. Blue Ocean Software's recently released Track-It! 5.0 ($995 for as many as five concurrent users) and Track-It! Enterprise Edition 5.0 ($2995 for five named users; $495 for each additional user), for example, feature inventory and workstation auditing modules.

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