I was on the lookout for a new helpdesk solution that would give us something more interactive. I don’t want to waste money but I also want something that has the required functionality and with a professional appearance. I remembered a thread on the Minasi forum from a few years ago and dug it out. One of the products recommended (by a savvy engineer/manager) was SmarterTrack.
I checked out their site in hopes of finding a demo. Even better; they had a fully functional free version. It took just a little while to get the VM up and running to try it on. I also fired up a Vista VM as a client. The product runs on either a SQL (including 2005 and 2008) or MySQL backend. It can run it’s own web server or on IIS6 or IIS7. It ran fine for me on a W2008 x64 server with SQL 2008. I tested the functionality.
- I had a choice between self-registered, helpdesk registered (with optional mail verification) or AD integrated users.
- There is the ability to create support groups.
- You have a news page.
- There is a user searchable Knowledge Base (KB) page.
- The portal shows news, recent KB articles and the most popular articles.
- There is a web based live chat.
- Users can create their own tickets.
- It can integrate into your mail system.
- There’s a big reporting system.
I’m very impressed with it. The free version gives you all the functionality which you can run on your own server. You’re just limited to one agent. You can have many users/customers. There are purchase versions that give you more agents and there is a hosted option as well if you’re not interested in having your own server.
They eat their own dogfood too. Their support site runs on their own product. I availed of their LiveChat to disable user self-registration. That was a quick option in the settings and a change of the site default document.