Spiceworks Help Desk -- a basic ticketing system
June 21, 2019
Spiceworks Help Desk -- a basic ticketing system
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Spiceworks
We use Spiceworks (on premises, not the cloud version) as a ticketing system across our entire organization. One of our locations is also using Spiceworks Inventory to keep track of workstations, printers, and other devices. We have more than 10+ IT support techs, 1000+ users submitting tickets, and 10000+ supported devices (1 for 1 school district). Users submit tickets via email. IT support mostly uses the web interface; the mobile app is used less often. Management tracks time spent on tickets via reports. Nothing groundbreaking --a normal ticketing system in a mid-size organization.
- Price: it is free.
- Ease of installation: all components (web server, database) are included in a single package. The entire ticketing system can be configured in 5 minutes.
- Email integration: we can submit tickets, add time, comments, and close over the email.
- Performance issues. With tens of thousands of tickets and thousands of devices in the Spiceworks database, reports can be very sluggish. Throwing more hardware resources does not help.
- Customization is limited. We use a custom script to control our ticket assignment, as rules inside Spiceworks are not adequate. Spiceworks implementation of Apache does not work well with configuration changes. The database server used is SQLite, which is quite limited -- working with the database directly is not advisable.
- Support and documentation are what can be expected from the ad-supported product. Most of the time forums are the best place to find answers.
- Spiceworks saves a significant amount of money for the organization of our size. I do not know the exact numbers quoted for alternative ticketing systems, but the amounts were significant.
- Spiceworks does its job -- tickets are tracked, time spent by IT support is recorded, inventory is useful.
- Troubleshooting and configuration is a long and arduous process due to the weak support and lack of configuration options. Many man-hours were spent on fixing issues with the ticketing system itself.
The main commercial alternative product evaluated was Zendesk, which was not selected because of the price. The second alternative researched was the osTicket, which was not selected as it was complicated to configure. With hindsight, I would suggest using osTicket instead of Spiceworks, as Spiceworks' use of SQLite as a database instead of MySQL created multiple issues. Currently, our organization is looking into a solution called incident IQ, which is specifically targeted at K-12 organizations. During the Spiceworks selection, our understanding of our requirements for the ticketing system was limited. Spiceworks allowed us to train our personnel in use of the ticketing system for free as well as to better understand our needs. It is perfect for this purpose.
Spiceworks Help Desk Feature Ratings
Using Spiceworks
K-12 teachers are the majority of our users. They submit tickets regarding student issues as well. We also have office staff (mix of Macs and Windows PCs) with usual office issues.
- Keeping track of end-user issues.
- Tracking time spent on issue resolution by Level I support technicians.
- Asset Inventory.