What I mean is that especially in the open source camp, there already are quite good solutions for the help desk (like OTRS) or network monitoring (like Nagios) so there’s no point in reinventing the wheel… badly.

I for one already have a working help desk system and a working monitoring system and thinking about taking them away with some half working solutions (not to put the blame on the developers: is too hard to make everything well when you try to get too many eggs in your basket) “just” to get into the hardware inventory side is a no-go.

I think that on the open source side the way to go is to focus on the inventory side and open APIs so the in-house technician can bind it with helpdesk, monitoring, etc. This, of course, doesn’t preclude the inventory software from delivering its own (or preferred third-party) help desk, inventory, etc. “plug-ins”, but not in a monolithic fashion.

The issue I discovered today is that there is no interface for deleting or modifying tickets or their replies. So I’ve sent a couple of test tickets, through the web and through email, and now I can’t get rid of them. I’d also like to see some stats on tickets and how long they’re open before they’re closed (unless I missed that), which is not necessarily a major feature so I can see why it wasn’t a first priority.

Also, there doesn’t appear to be a way to change the hardware item a ticket is attached to if it is incorrect, but I may have missed this if it was there (I didn’t have too much time to get in-depth today either). And it would be nice to attach multiple hardware items to one ticket. Why? I’m not sure, I can’t think of a reason at the moment. But it is night time and time to sleep soon, so maybe I’ll think of a reason later :-)

I didn’t get a chance to play with the user submission web interface much, so I can’t tell if it associates the ticket with the computer the user is submitting from or not, which would be cool in the cases it could be detected by hostname, but like I said I have no idea one way or the other right now. There are more features that I’d expect for the help desk feature being so new, however, and the features that are there seem to be well done and have few bugs if any!

There is a wizard for setting it up the first time you visit the help desk, but if that has already showed up, you might try going to the help desk tab and clicking the Help link at the top right.

Thanks for trying out Spiceworks.