I am testing version 8 of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. It is a web-based helpdesk solution that I have been using for several years at METI. Version 5.5 has a few annoying limitations and I wanted to see what improvements version 8 has. Unfortunately, my website hosting plan does not give me shell access required to install the binary files. I decided I wanted to try it bad enough, so I setup my own web server at home and am using a dynamic DNS to allow me to access it outside my local home network and get around not having a statically assigned IP.

What I am especially excited about is using the auto account creation feature. At METI our helpdesk is configured to tie-in with Active Directory since we only support internal employees on it. Records need to be imported manually and since it is not an outwardly-facing server, our employees need to be on the company's VPN to access it. This of course limits junk email accounts from polluting your user database, but in a business such as mine, pre-screening every prospective client and pre-entering their contact info is not something I want to take the time to do, nor do I want to necessarily want to pay someone to do it either. With the auto account creation feature I can capture leads from an email and generate trouble tickets automatically. Also, my users can log into the helpdesk system to update their own account information, follow up on past or present incidents, or look up solutions to common problems in the knowledge base!

Part of me wishes I could have installed it on my current web host, but I would not have gotten the experience of setting up a web server from scratch. I have set one up before - this one is running Ubuntu 10.10 server and I opted not to install a GUI at all. I am pretty proud that I was able to download the ISO, burn the CD, Install the OS, configure the server (Apache, MySQL, PHP) download, install, and configure the help desk app -- all in one evening! There were some permissions problems I encountered along the way and since I wanted this to run as a service on startup, I had to modify the directions that were not made for Debian-based distributions. I am really not sure if there is a special user account this is supposed to run under - it would seem so, but was able to modify ownership of some directories to fix that.

I guess time will tell but already I am enjoying the fact that users can reply from within the ticket not just merely add notes, and the metrics that get put on your dashboard look really sweet. I can certainly see how in a much larger organization this would be extremely useful.