Spiceworks

Ideal free helpdesk for small to medium businesses

Comments: Overall I have been very happy with Spiceworks, especially the community of users.

Pros:

It's impossible to beat the cost of free. The product is well designed and functions extremely well for the job it is designed for.

Cons:

Larger IT departments won't be able to route tickets to specific teams. It would be very nice if spiceworks could expand its offering to include sub service desks etc.

Help Desk Where You Want It

Comments: Starting a new role in the organization that had no Help Desk and no history or structure; Spiceworks proved to be the single biggest one thing that could be done right that would yeild improved IT services to the organization. User responsibility shifted to reporting IT issues using email and overall satisfaction improved and service impacting issues due to weaknesses in infrastructure, bad procedures or mislaid processes were identified by the ticketing system and corrected.

Pros:

I started using Spiceworks in the cloud and then copied the database and importing it to our VM and lost nothing. It is an efficient and easy to use platform. Adding techs and break-fix categories to track what needs to be improved proved to be successful. This allows IT to focus on root cause and then to deploy solutions to prevent the same.

Cons:

The reports need to be streamlined to remove redundancy. Quantity is not always a good thing and by compressing and focusing on key areas the reporting could be a lot better and less fractured.

Ticketing Tool

Comments: We are using Spiceworks for ticketing day to day issues where users are facing and for regular follow-up of any tasks assigned.

Pros:

I liked the ticketing process or features that were available when creating tickets, as well as the email alerts for each follow-up.

Cons:

The least i like was server availability, Some times due to work load the server gets crashing and after restarting all the services only it will work without any issues.The initial stage of setup using authentication was difficult.

Awesome IT Help Desk software, horrible inventory system.

Pros:

Spiceworks is great for managing help desk tickets. Using HTML we've been able to customize our end-user portal. Create multiple ticket templates to capture the details we truly need from end-users. We have found that the mobile application for iOS and Android to be the best on the market. It has a great GUI, very user friendly, informative, and easy to set up.

Cons:

The inventory system is lacking when it comes to producing accurate information. At one point this year we were upgrading our end users to dual monitors. We attempted to use Spiceworks to produce the make and model of the current monitor the end users were using. It came back telling us a generic description. I ended up writing a batch file that would obtain them remotely and that was accurate. We've also had issues where it would scan a computer that had 2 monitors but would only show one. We also went through a license key audit and thought we could rely on Spiceworks to produce accurate results. It ended up showing us that several computers had 3 iterations of office installed. I understand that these keys are in the registry but other similar scanners would only produce keys for whats actually installed on the workstation by cross-referencing installed applications and registry keys. We recently have been experiencing issues where Spiceworks would attempt to scan 180 assets and it would fail to complete the scan without errors. We found this out by using WSUS to determine how many computers we had and Spiceworks was off by 30 assets of the 180. At least twice a week it also locks up and our end users can't access the help desk portal to submit tickets. We've chosen to use LanSweeper to track assets. LanSweeper produced accurate results in a fraction of the time Spiceworks produced incomplete results. Spiceworks took 8+ hours, LanSweeper <30 minutes.

It works well for a small business support desk

Comments: The UI is intuitive and easy to use, especially if you're new to helpdesk software. It's easy to use and efficient, making it ideal for a company with a small support staff. It's simple to use; I was able to set up my agents and ticket alerts and begin receiving tickets in a matter of minutes.

Pros:

For internal clients, we rely only on Spiceworks as our ticket-based support system. If a user experiences a problem that can be resolved by IT, they need only visit the site and, in a matter of seconds, create a ticket that includes screenshots and other information that will aid us in fixing the problem as soon as possible.

Cons:

My only gripe is that it is not simple to view all tickets in one place, regardless of their status, using the "my tickets" feature.