Help Desk Software Tools

A help desk is a resource that a majority of companies use today. Help desks are designed to provide users with information and assistance for technical support of hardware or software. Many help desks involve a support person working to assist customers to solve a problem directly or forward the problem to someone else. Often, services are provided by call centers or over the Internet. This paper will review three help desk software packages: Aegis Service Desk, which is local software, CRMdesk, which is remotely hosted, and, ReadyDesk which is completely web based. Local help desk software is software that requires local installation on each server or every workstation. Local help desk software is good for smaller offices that do not require much maintenance. Aegis Service Desk is developed by Abacus Systems. Aegis is designed specifically for tracking general incidents and responses, clients and contacts and assets. It 's suited for any company or individual that needs to track customer problems, queries, requests, assets, and responses to clients. It fully supports the ITIL standard within an IT service environment. Comprehensive service management processes are fully integrated in the single application. Many of the features in this software will make the support person’s job much easier. Aegis Service Desk has an automatic notification which allows the user to notify clients and internal users of any changes. Aegis has two levels of notifications; record level and field level. Record level is based on changes to a record and allows the user to define which clients to notify when an incident is added, edited, deleted, or copied. Field level allows users to also define which clients to notify when a field is changed or when that field is equal to a defined value. Another feature of Aegis is called Workflow. One can use workflow to automatically assign or reassign calls to a support consultant or a user group. For example, if the Call Type is a

Bibliography: Abacus Systems. Home Page. Retrieved on September 17, 2008 from <http://www.abacus-systems.com> CRMdesk Online Support Solution.Home Page.Retrieved on September 21, 2008 from <http://www.crmdesk.com> ReadyDesk. Home Page. Retrieved on September 29, 2008 from <http://www.ReadyDesk.com>