BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

And, now I continue my investigation with a first look at commercial help desk solutions… (note: that I haven’t yet installed any of these myself. I have formed my opinions from the product’s own web site, tours and any other reviews I’ve come across. I want to see what is/is not worth installing for a closer look)

Ferrysoft Help Desk : I discovered that this is now free of charge for the single user version, which is a bonus. One user at the moment is fine, although if I wanted to add more concurrent users in future it is expensive here compared to other the alternatives: US$570 per extra user! (compared with US$358 for HelpSpot, US$258 for FogBugz for buying the first two licenses). Nothing in its design or feature list jumps out at me to suggest that it is worth that much extra.

It’s also based on Microsoft SQL Server, which I’m not familiar with but there is an Express Edition which is available free which can run it.

helpdeskonline.net: This solution is different from the others in that it is a hosted solution. Now, considering I’m developing a hosted web service myself, I’m obviously not against hosted solutions. However, in this case, I am not sure how well this would work in terms of being able to integrate it smoothly into my own site.
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HelpSpot: This one I definitely wanted to have a closer look at as its feature list had a number of interesting options, such as knowledge books and its customisation options.

From reading their website, Userscape seem to have a philosophy of building in options to aid in integrating HelpSpot with other systems wherever applicable. To a large extent this makes up for not having access to the source code (it’s Zend encoded). For instance, the black box authentication feature that lets you tie it into your own sign on system, the email as a service feature, or the live lookup system that sounds useful for hooking into your CRM system. I don’t know how well all these things work, but I like the thinking behind them. Let’s hope HelpSpot continues down this path.

Knowledge Books are a bit of a twist on the standard FAQ facilities, and I can see how users would find this easier to navigate being just like the contents of a book. To really make this a great tool for managing your product’s documentation it would be nice to have a script or button to run through and convert a knowledge book into a print-ready PDF file.

Apart from the tour, two preview articles on Ian Landsman’s blog provide some good details into how HelpSpot works:

• HelpSpot Sneak Peek 1: Request Page
• HelpSpot Preview 2 – The Workspace

They were written during HelpSpot’s beta so I suppose some things could have changed.

“So many other help desk management solutions crowd the page with dozens of form fields on this page even when most of these fields are never used on any one request.”

That quote reminds me of BugZilla, whose interface was the main reason that I was turned off using it.

“Help desk software is intrinsically a ‘high read’ environment. There’s simply alot of information that needs to be consumed by staff members …. An effective approach is to use colors and images to give a quick understanding of the situation.”

Yes, and from the screenshots they appear to have worked out some nice efficient layouts and colour schemes to help with this. It is (seemingly) simple ideas such as this that can make a huge difference to a user’s usage of a product. I know personally, I am much more inclined to keep using software that assists me like this without getting in the way.

“HelpSpot integrates seamlessly with one or more email accounts. For example, keep you requests organized by having several support email accounts: support@example.com, passwords@example.com, printers@example.com. Emails from different accounts can be automatically assigned to a request category and even assigned to a specific user.”

From what I can gather most help desk software is designed to work with a single support address (osTicket, FogBugz). This feature could be especially useful to categorise requests from more than one product/service. e.g. support@myproduct.com and help@thoughtfiler.net.

I’m quite impressed with this package, it is obvious that a lot of thought and careful design have gone into it. Basically, it just looks like a web application that would be easy and enjoyable to use. I think it would definitely be worthy of a proper trial.

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FogBugz: Now this one has to be good doesn’t it? After all, it has Fog Creek and the infamous Joel behind it. Although hopefully it treats data better than CityDesk, which only succeeded in corrupting databases when I gave it a trial, and was quickly removed! Anyway, one feature of their website provided an excellent way to get an initial feel for the software – the Fogbugz movie.

Something that this has that the others don’t is source control integration. I imagine having bug fixes/features linked to the relevant check-ins could be very useful after projects have been going awhile.

On the other hand, it does not seem to have any concept of a user portal like HelpSpot does. Nor does there seem to be any mention of the use of templates to integrate the system into your own site, although Fog Creek confirmed that you do get all the source code and that, most of the layout is in CSS files and therefore customisable.

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Of course, FogBugz may be about to become the big winner and blow all the competition out of the water, with FogBugz 5 soon to enter beta. So it may be worth checking this out in a few weeks to see what has been added.
Kayako eSupport: This seems to be a popular package on the net, especially for hosting companies. The customer portal page of their online demo was instantly familiar from previous tickets I’ve logged in the past with various companies.

The portal page has a nice clean and simple look to it that’s appealing, although the lack of an integrated forum (ala Helpspot & FogBugz) is a disappointment. However, having a Downloads library integrated in a help desk system seems like a neat idea. Seems like a potentially good way to organise all of those supplemental files that only certain users will need to download for specific purposes.

The system does appear to be template-based, which should make it possible to integrate with your own site, similar to HelpSpot.

They have a number of pricing options available:

Personally, I wouldn’t want to lease software for something as business critical as a help-desk package so the Owned option would be the only one I would consider here, which is reasonably priced.
Conclusion: Hmm… I think I need a comparison table next… but I am currently leaning towards HelpSpot as having the best all-round feature set and customisation options… although it may be worth waiting a week or three to see what Fog Creek have in store for FogBugz 5…