Helpdesk/issue tracker recommendation for extremely large number of tickets

CGrieves

CGrieves

CGrieves

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I have a department currently using an Exchange inbox/folder setup for issues and tracking. It works OK functionally, but they see about 10,000 emails per month, and retention has to be for 3 years, so as you can imagine with free text searches on a large exchange inbox being as they are, we think it's time for another solution.

Can be free or paid. We use Spiceworks as an IT helpdesk and Jira for dev, but it's pretty clear Spiceworks won't scale due to the flat file architecture, and I have my doubts about Jira too for those volumes.

requirements are pretty simple- issues submitted via email, group access to assign staff and priorities. Email updates, track via email subject/tracking reference. SLA timers should take account of working hours. Should be able to assign multiple watchers to issues. Basic reporting- number of issues within/without SLA, average resolution times.

It would be very useful if individual issues can be linked to via URL so we can tie it into our reservation system with simple links

There's plenty out there that meets the requirements, the problem is assessing how they perform with lots of data, so any experience would be appreciated!
 
Hi,

Give OTRS a look. I've implemented for a small team I work in and it works very well. It can use a SQL/MySQL Backend and can scale out quite well.

There are free and paid for versions. Its also quite customisable, I've had to add a number of fields to adapt to our requirements.

Mark
 
JIRA isn't really a helpdesk, it can just be used like one. It's great if people are submitting tickets about internal software and your developers are plugged into it, otherwise not such a good fit.

RT is an absolute beast, you can get it do whatever you want and look however you want it to look. It's also all written in Perl. If you can hack that then it's great.

I'm a big fan of Kayako, does everything you want it to, looks nice while doing it.
 
Thanks guys, I've set up a trial of OTRS and Kayako. OTRS looks functionally excellent, but visually horrible. I should have mentioned that the portal has to be brandable too. As for Kayako, so far I'm warming to it, and feedback seems to be good for usage in scale.

Cheers for the advice! Still open to more opinions :)

P.S. Caged, you're right, I worded that badly- we only user Jira for SDLC! Having said that Jira Service Desk looks like a great product, and would have fit us to a T, except there's no email issue submission unless you hack it via plugins. Big omission in my opinion, and probably will cripple sales.
 
I completely forgot they did a Service Desk product. They seem fairly open to discussion though so I'm sure if you went through their sales channels and said "we are looking to buy this for a lot of cash, we need email submission" they'd at least be able to give you a date for it being included.

If you already use JIRA then it's got to reduce any training requirements as well.
 
Remedy or Maximo are massive apps for this, as said also come with big bills ;)

Used ServiceNow before which has been ok, would need to check it meets all requirements though
 
Remedy, JIRA, OTRS, ServiceNow, RequestTracker, Service Cloud (Salesforce) < this is the best ive used, by far.
 
CGrieves said:
Thanks guys, I've set up a trial of OTRS and Kayako. OTRS looks functionally excellent, but visually horrible. I should have mentioned that the portal has to be brandable too. As for Kayako, so far I'm warming to it, and feedback seems to be good for usage in scale.
Click to expand...

Portal and Agent sites are brandable on OTRS through SysConfig.
 
We used Kayako but eventually outgrew that when it didn't really work with what we wanted to do and we wanted to scale with more staff. Zendesk pricing was just laughable really, so we eventually just made our own.

http://sirportly.com/ certainly looks interesting as a relative newcomer to the scene.
 
We use hp service manager, it's the most shocking turd of a product I have ever used it's also very expensive, shockingly expensive. I'd rate it at 0 out of 100
 
daz said:
We used Kayako but eventually outgrew that when it didn't really work with what we wanted to do and we wanted to scale with more staff. Zendesk pricing was just laughable really, so we eventually just made our own.

http://sirportly.com/ certainly looks interesting as a relative newcomer to the scene.
Click to expand...

Tell me more Daz- Kayako is currently looking like the best fit from a functional standpoint. I've got the trial configured and nearly ready for UAT.

Initially it'll be for about 35 staff dealing with about 10,000 tickets per month -so about 10 tickets per user per day. Do you think it'll cope?

We'll probably be similar implementations out to two other (totally separate) departments, but as it's a per-agent cost I'll just re-register for another Kayako instance for each and keep them entirely separate, seems like a much more flexible method, and could perhaps help with scaling versus one instance with multiple departments.
 
Autotask has been my favourite so far. Just changed employment and they use ConnectWise. It's OK, but I think Autotask handles certain things better. CW does have a better client portal and handles ticket notifications much better though.
 
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