I have been working in an I.T. Help Desk environment for many years now. I have previously worked for Convergys and then Hewlett-Packard. Now I am working at Microsoft within their MSIT Help Desk providing Tier 2 Exchange Server support. Yes, I know. I am working far from my passion, which is *NIX and Python. However, it pays the bills, and in this economy that is really all that matter at this point in time.
The point of bringing up this post, is that some of my readers must work in some sort of Information Technology environment which makes use of a ticketing tool of some sorts to report bugs and issues with software or servers your team is responsible for. I have had all the luck with corporate ticketing software. Once I was hired on for Microsoft, I thought to myself, they must use the state of the art ticketing software which will rarely break or crash. Well, I was wrong on so many levels. Not to dive too deeply into the problems of the ticketing software. I'm just surprised on how many different ticketing tools I have used in my career and basically none of them are more than 75% reliable. Shouldn't a ticketing tool be more reliable than the software being reported on, in order to actually be-able to carry out daily activities and report/act upon tickets?
With my experiencing in working on various Tier's of Help Desk in the Information Technology industry. I wouldn't mind creating a new cloud-based ticket software targeted at the Information Technology industry. There are actually a few existing products which already do this, Sales Force is to name one. However, this product is mainly used on Internet-based sales websites. It is not directly targeted for the Information Technology sector. There is a rather large list of help desk software, some of which I have heard of, namely ZenDesk. Although, I have not yet worked at a HelpDesk which uses any of these solutions.
I have already developed a Ticketing/Asset/Contact/Billing management system for an existing website I manage. I plan on incorporating the skills I made there into a new cloud-based ticketing system, targeted at I.T. The largest different between my solution and the many pre-existing solutions on the market, is that I will customize the solution for my clients specific requirements. Does my client need new fields or a special API developed for integration with their infrastructure? No problem. Does my client require some sort of Active Directory connector to easily read customer/engineer information? Is there a specific mailbox the client would like scanned for newly updated tickets? These are just some of the customizations which I will be willing to provide. I plan on going above and beyond when it comes to developing a solution which matches the requirements from my client.
The entire solution will obviously be built using Python technologies, with scalability in mind from the start of development. I will make as much efforts as I can in documenting the development process through my blog here. Do you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in a ticketing system?
Cloud solutions are great, and many companies will love a cloud solution. However, just as many companies will be resistant and/or unable to use a cloud solution due to the way they perceive their tickets--namely, they could contain proprietary data that can't leave the "4 walls" of the company.
If you're looking for SaaS ticketing etc. systems, my employer offers a pretty good one (www.parature.com). Lots of companies use it, including some very small and some very large ones. You might find it interesting, especially if ZenDesk looks a little too limited and SalesForce's support system looks like it's just an "extra feature".
One of the biggest reasons companies use terrible helpdesk software is money.
The entire article didn't not publish... caching problem. Although it should have been full intact via the Atom feed.
I've been wanting to construct a better ticketing system for *years*. I'm constantly amazed at the shoddiness of every single ticketing system I've used. My idea was the same as yours. Cloud based, customizable, reliable, etc... My particular aim is at IT rather than software developers. I have a pretty good list that I've updated over the years that is a very loose set of requirements and feature wish lists. Wouldn't it be amazing to create software that filled this need and didn't require an IE ActiveX plugin, or that only ran reliably on XP, or..... you name it.
I'm curious to find out what blog platform you have been utilizing? I'm having some small security problems with my latest site and I would like to find something more secure. Do you have any suggestions?