IT Helpdesk System - Recommendations?

[MacVault]

Can anyone recommend a great, intuitive, well-thought-out, fast, web-based helpdesk solution with a.... modern, elegant user interface and a good backend DB for a company consisting of about 200 workstations and 50 servers? What do you all use?

I've been in IT for about 10 years and have tried the following:

-- Track-IT: Expensive
-- Request Tracker: A pain in the A-- and quite ugly
-- SysAid: Easy to install but UI is also quite ugly
-- OTRS: I just don't get the UI / workflow - again, quite ugly and disjointed
-- Remedy: too big and expensive

I've done google searches, etc, and just have yet to find anything I really feel comfortable putting the energy into migrating to. We currently use SysAid but I'm not thrilled about it's UI. I'm looking for a professional, modern UI which will help everyone want to use it. It also needs to have all the basic features such as email to ticket generation, user portal, etc. Asset tracking and management would also be nice for physical assets and software licensing.

I can't beleive I haven't been able to find such a system. I'm interested in commercial product as well as free / open source.

 

[steve2112]

From what I have seen, this is the problem you are going to face all over. If you want a good UI and support it will be expensive. Cheaper systems usually don't have the features and look you want. I currently use TrackIT and have used Remedy and they are both pretty good but expensive. During my first help desk job many years ago, I used SupportMagic and it was decent. I haven't seen prices on it in a long time, though.

 

[steviem]

Kayako eSupport is ok and cheap, not sure how limited it is once your supporting loads of users (was supporting 350 at one point at the last company I was with).

Unfortunately I don't have notes on my experience with it, but it was nicer from a support engineer's perspective than that behemoth of Remedy....

 

[calderone]

We are looking at ZenDesk, my company's Customer Service Department uses it for product support.

I did some JavaScript work for them and it is pretty extensible/customizable. Ironically enough, ZenDesk's customer support sucks.

We are also looking at OTRS. Honestly have had time, it needs to happen soon as we are hitting 800+ workstations. Support isn't so bad in a nearly all Mac environment though

 

[iWoz]

We use Remedy, It seems most company's are going down the ITIL route, which is quite big right now