Are there any good ticket systems out there?

The part-time job uses OTRS and they are quite happy with it. They aren’t a very big shop, and also not as Microsoft centric as some others. Probably the most attractive feature was the price: Free.

At the other job, we’re in the process of evaluating several different ticketing systems. Number one on the list is TrackIT, and in my honest opinion, it sucks. It seems to have started out as a decent ticket system, then features got added on to make it “better” and they just didn’t know when to stop. Now it’s got the kitchen sink: inventory management, purchase orders, software inventory, software installation/deployment, etc. Every time you add something that wasn’t in the original design some other feature suffers. Eventually the interface looks like a ricerocket dashboard: lots of pretty lights and gauges but the twit behind the wheel only bought them because they were “cool” and doesn’t know what any of them mean.

This is just another bump in the long running “build vs buy” argument. We’ve built everything in-house for so long, the pendulum is swinging hard towards the buy side. All this does is transfer work from the developers over to us, the Network Administrators.

Not to just rant aimlessly or anything, but it doesn’t help that no one has given me more than “install it and make it work” as a directive. Every time we try to get an idea of where a project is headed, no one is prepared to give any answers. But, at least we got involved in this one before the purchase had been decided and the money was long since spent.

The “managers” think that forcing people to use a ticket system will allow them to have a better idea of what their employees are doing on a day to day basis. I find it hard to believe that adding the extra overhead of updating a ticket/work order/whatever everytime someone calls to tell someone something is broke is going to help. As for the other groups, piling on software can’t solve the basic problem of poor management and a near total absence of teamwork.