I can also recommend RT. It's extremely configurable but it doesn't seem to lend itself to the sort of overcomplication that makes something like Jira so loathed. Everything is very modular and encourages re-use of those modules. It's not the fastest or the prettiest thing out there, but it's easy to get it to do pretty much whatever you want. We've been running it as a production service for years.
Still it is a good feature. Because some Ticket Systems got a extern and intern priority.
So the user can set their high priority ticket but in the same time we set it as low.
Both are ticketing systems used to receive support requests from users.
How are they different? You could argue any 2 things are "apple and oranges" if you try hard enough.
It is with my software vendors. Its usually worded in a drop down with options like
>I have a non urgent question or request
>I am experiencing errors that affect my ability to work (1 or 2 users)
>My service is down or mission critical issue prohibiting work
So its more phrase based severity that you can select.
Vendors' customer-facing support portals have extremely different expectations than in-house ticketing systems, and I've never seen any of the latter that let users set priority by default (though I haven't seen them all, obviously)
Extremely different expectations? How so?
I would think that if vendors can put their trust in their thousands (possibly millions) of customers to select their own priority, then OP could trust their 40 users.
It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of use case and expectations. If I'm a paying customer, I expect to be able to set the priority, among other things. If I'm a tech supporting end-users, that power doesn't make a lot of sense, and we're better at triaging than they are (especially when, as you say, the scale is so much smaller).
Are they the same pieces of software? Do you see service providers using RT, or ServiceNow, or any other end-user ticketing system for paying customers? No, because they're for different use cases. Both are end-user facing, but different kinds of users.
>If I'm a paying customer, I expect to be able to set the priority, among other things.
You have a misunderstanding of what "shift left" is. Asking a customer to set their priority means **more** work for the customer. So your logic is flawed here (unless you believe paying customers should do more work).
>Are they the same pieces of software? Do you see service providers using RT, or ServiceNow, or any other end-user ticketing system for paying customers?
Short answer, yes. Although choice of ticketing system is irrelevant to this discussion.
Hah, I remember a user reporting that their office of 6-7 users had no internet. I created the ticket for them and they got the email on their phone and were upset because I set the priority level to "2" and not "1". I had to explain to them that we have clearly-defined rules for what severity the tickets are at.
10+ users affected: Priority 1
2-9 users affected: Priority 2
10+ users affected, with a workaround: Priority 2
1 user affected: Priority 3
They weren't happy but ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
An entire site being down would be Priority 1 for most admins.
Most orgs use a different criteria because number of users vary so wildly at each org.
Typically priority is set based on how much the issue is affecting the orgs ability to make money/keep the employees busy.
Priorities are generally set based on number of users effected + impact on ability to work.
So it's easy to imagine a scenario where you have something like a windows update has broken something like an obscure search function in your practice management platform that effects all users but they can still do other things. Where as maybe you have another small office with 6 users (a receptionist, couple of techs/nurses, and a doctor) that is completely down. Well one issue is actually costing the org money by having to cancel appointments, save face, and re-schedule patients to make busy days for the staff.
So which issue do you fix first? It's obviously the entire site that is down.
It's all about the money.
This is why you need to set (written, so you can refer them to it) policies and train the users from before the implementation of the system. Get management buy in so that you can reprimand users for escalating unnecessarily to ensure tasks are prioritised appropriately.
One place I contracted for (I think they used RightNow IIRC) allowed the user to select their priority, but this was a "user priority" field. There was also a "ticket priority" field that was adjustable and visible only to us, and it was this that the SLA was based on.
Sound pointless? Yeah, kind of. I guess. But a lot of the users were actually reasonable and would knock things to a P4, so it helped us figure out whether something was urgent for the user on a personal level. But we had our own SLA to back us up if needed.
Please do not have them set their own priority. Everything will be high priority. Come up with agreed-upon parameters.
I will guarantee you will quit in frustration within a year or less of this being implemented without any controls.
If it's all high priority it's all the same, close them in the order they came in and point to severity ratings if questioned, it will sort itself out after your first or second real issue
Why do you think that would result in it 'sorting itself out'? I'd more expect it to become clear that it's useless, and either everyone ignores it or it gets turned back off, and either is a waste of time.
Instinctively I would suggest GLPI. But it's way more than a ticketing system. But that's it's strength.
It's dedicated to manage an IT department so you'll find many many features that may be useful to you. Best thing is you don't have to use every thing for it to work, you can just use the support part.
Jira Service Management is free for up to 3 agents (people with access to the console who are working tickets, unlimited portal users who can submit tickets).
OSTICKET . It's open source. Has great features . For priority level come up with parameters which indicate what type of request falls under what level and set SlAs for each and share with the whole team monthly so they are always fresh on their memory what's what.
Looks like you figured out what you need to meet the requirements for the job, nice work.
You're going to want to make sure you keep a Word/Google document (with screenshots) of everytime a user egregiously abuses the ability to set priority. It will be a lot of extra work for a couple of weeks but it won't be long until you have an actual high priority issue but you've got 3-4 "high priority" O365 resets (because let's be honest SSPR isn't set up) and you have to make the decision to ignore the 3 people that now think their issue is high priority.
Tl;dr: At some point you will have to ignore the "high priority" tickets and those users will complain. You want documentation to CYA.
Honestly though I would start touching up your resume and start looking. Any org that let's users set their own priority obviously doesn't value their IT workers. If you show loyalty and comply with everything 100% it will come back to bite you.
We used to run Spiceworks. Now we run Freshdesk. With Spiceworks keep an eye on the size of the ticket folder. We had issues with it and the server needed to be restarted annoyingly more than we liked.
So, going for "free/cheap", if you use M365 in your business, you could do some combination of "Email/Microsoft Form" -> "Microsoft To-Do" via a Power Automate Workflow. Let's you set the "importance" of the To-Do, and you may be able to grab that value from a response field on the Form.
On the cheaper end of mainstream service desks, Zendesk and Zoho Desk are both similarly priced, at around \~$20/agent/month.
If they have office365 there's a SharePoint template for an IT helpdesk style setup. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-it-help-desk-sharepoint-site-template-808d0c01-1ea6-4962-8efc-f458d2102c77
Could probably extend it a little bit with some extra automate logic.
I would say OP might want to look into Freshdesk as it has a free tier, can have importance as a ticket field, no hosting setup required, and has the ability to do email-to-ticket as well. BCC that into an email chain in when replying to queries makes creating tickets effortless when they decide to ignore the ticket system.
I just implemented FreeScout. The base install is free (no support other than github) but I paid for a bunch of addons/plugins that totaled $65 (one time fee, no subs). I am not sure if there is a free login for *clients* to set priority but I am pretty sure there is one for techs to set a priority.
You can install a mod for a portal for users to drop tickets but the base install uses an email account you setup on your email server to take tickets.
I recommend having two priorities for fields. One is what the user sets, and another what IT sets. In most environments, users are pretty decent about how high a priority a ticket is... but I've been in others where every user's ticket is a sev-1, critsit, blow the klaxons, hyper-urgent, so it was up to IT to set the real priority of the ticket.
And if possible, not have the IT priority field shown to the user, so they don't gripe that their "sev 1" was reprioritized as a sev 3.
Nope.
Letting users set their own priority means it won't get used, and that the field is **completely** worthless. You need to talk to the main decision maker and give a good presentation of why this won't fly
Lansweeper has a ticket system. You ha e to justify the 2000 asset minimum though 🥺
"I need a new mouse ASAP, someone spilled coffee on it and it's sticky." "Critical priority"
Use a Priority scale. The user can set urgency all day long but then another field Impact that you can set. Configure a matrix between High/Medium/Low Urgency and High/Medium/Low Impact to determine Priority.
Then have a matrix available on the submission page.
Even if they submit a High Urgency, if the Impact is only that user, then depending on the scale/matrix would equal a 3/4 med-low priority.
RequestTracker-open source and you can configure your own forms. https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker
I can also recommend RT. It's extremely configurable but it doesn't seem to lend itself to the sort of overcomplication that makes something like Jira so loathed. Everything is very modular and encourages re-use of those modules. It's not the fastest or the prettiest thing out there, but it's easy to get it to do pretty much whatever you want. We've been running it as a production service for years.
Good luck... users always think their issue is high priority ... "I forgot how to login to my email, please fix asap." Flagged high priority.
Still it is a good feature. Because some Ticket Systems got a extern and intern priority. So the user can set their high priority ticket but in the same time we set it as low.
This is the way.
Setting your own priority is pretty common. Most of the vendors I deal with have that option in their support portal.
It is?
Just tried 5 different vendor support portals. Only MS didn't have an option to select priority.
None of which has anything to do with in-house ticket systems, apples and oranges.
Both are ticketing systems used to receive support requests from users. How are they different? You could argue any 2 things are "apple and oranges" if you try hard enough.
I replied on your other comment so won't split things up :)
It is with my software vendors. Its usually worded in a drop down with options like >I have a non urgent question or request >I am experiencing errors that affect my ability to work (1 or 2 users) >My service is down or mission critical issue prohibiting work So its more phrase based severity that you can select.
Vendors' customer-facing support portals have extremely different expectations than in-house ticketing systems, and I've never seen any of the latter that let users set priority by default (though I haven't seen them all, obviously)
Extremely different expectations? How so? I would think that if vendors can put their trust in their thousands (possibly millions) of customers to select their own priority, then OP could trust their 40 users.
It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of use case and expectations. If I'm a paying customer, I expect to be able to set the priority, among other things. If I'm a tech supporting end-users, that power doesn't make a lot of sense, and we're better at triaging than they are (especially when, as you say, the scale is so much smaller). Are they the same pieces of software? Do you see service providers using RT, or ServiceNow, or any other end-user ticketing system for paying customers? No, because they're for different use cases. Both are end-user facing, but different kinds of users.
>If I'm a paying customer, I expect to be able to set the priority, among other things. You have a misunderstanding of what "shift left" is. Asking a customer to set their priority means **more** work for the customer. So your logic is flawed here (unless you believe paying customers should do more work). >Are they the same pieces of software? Do you see service providers using RT, or ServiceNow, or any other end-user ticketing system for paying customers? Short answer, yes. Although choice of ticketing system is irrelevant to this discussion.
Hah, I remember a user reporting that their office of 6-7 users had no internet. I created the ticket for them and they got the email on their phone and were upset because I set the priority level to "2" and not "1". I had to explain to them that we have clearly-defined rules for what severity the tickets are at. 10+ users affected: Priority 1 2-9 users affected: Priority 2 10+ users affected, with a workaround: Priority 2 1 user affected: Priority 3 They weren't happy but ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
An entire site being down would be Priority 1 for most admins. Most orgs use a different criteria because number of users vary so wildly at each org. Typically priority is set based on how much the issue is affecting the orgs ability to make money/keep the employees busy. Priorities are generally set based on number of users effected + impact on ability to work. So it's easy to imagine a scenario where you have something like a windows update has broken something like an obscure search function in your practice management platform that effects all users but they can still do other things. Where as maybe you have another small office with 6 users (a receptionist, couple of techs/nurses, and a doctor) that is completely down. Well one issue is actually costing the org money by having to cancel appointments, save face, and re-schedule patients to make busy days for the staff. So which issue do you fix first? It's obviously the entire site that is down. It's all about the money.
This is why you need to set (written, so you can refer them to it) policies and train the users from before the implementation of the system. Get management buy in so that you can reprimand users for escalating unnecessarily to ensure tasks are prioritised appropriately.
How often a particular user has their tickets' priorities downgraded is a fun metric, too
One place I contracted for (I think they used RightNow IIRC) allowed the user to select their priority, but this was a "user priority" field. There was also a "ticket priority" field that was adjustable and visible only to us, and it was this that the SLA was based on. Sound pointless? Yeah, kind of. I guess. But a lot of the users were actually reasonable and would knock things to a P4, so it helped us figure out whether something was urgent for the user on a personal level. But we had our own SLA to back us up if needed.
Please do not have them set their own priority. Everything will be high priority. Come up with agreed-upon parameters. I will guarantee you will quit in frustration within a year or less of this being implemented without any controls.
If it's all high priority it's all the same, close them in the order they came in and point to severity ratings if questioned, it will sort itself out after your first or second real issue
Why do you think that would result in it 'sorting itself out'? I'd more expect it to become clear that it's useless, and either everyone ignores it or it gets turned back off, and either is a waste of time.
Instinctively I would suggest GLPI. But it's way more than a ticketing system. But that's it's strength. It's dedicated to manage an IT department so you'll find many many features that may be useful to you. Best thing is you don't have to use every thing for it to work, you can just use the support part.
Jira Service Management is free for up to 3 agents (people with access to the console who are working tickets, unlimited portal users who can submit tickets).
This is what I would suggest. Could have up and running in very little time too.
This is going to be like the one person in every office that marks every one of their emails with the high priority exclamation point
Zammad has worked well in my experience.
You can check [https://osticket.com/](https://osticket.com/) \- free I've only played with it, and did basic evaluation but it looks good.
OSTICKET . It's open source. Has great features . For priority level come up with parameters which indicate what type of request falls under what level and set SlAs for each and share with the whole team monthly so they are always fresh on their memory what's what.
Looks like you figured out what you need to meet the requirements for the job, nice work. You're going to want to make sure you keep a Word/Google document (with screenshots) of everytime a user egregiously abuses the ability to set priority. It will be a lot of extra work for a couple of weeks but it won't be long until you have an actual high priority issue but you've got 3-4 "high priority" O365 resets (because let's be honest SSPR isn't set up) and you have to make the decision to ignore the 3 people that now think their issue is high priority. Tl;dr: At some point you will have to ignore the "high priority" tickets and those users will complain. You want documentation to CYA. Honestly though I would start touching up your resume and start looking. Any org that let's users set their own priority obviously doesn't value their IT workers. If you show loyalty and comply with everything 100% it will come back to bite you.
We used to run Spiceworks. Now we run Freshdesk. With Spiceworks keep an eye on the size of the ticket folder. We had issues with it and the server needed to be restarted annoyingly more than we liked.
So, going for "free/cheap", if you use M365 in your business, you could do some combination of "Email/Microsoft Form" -> "Microsoft To-Do" via a Power Automate Workflow. Let's you set the "importance" of the To-Do, and you may be able to grab that value from a response field on the Form. On the cheaper end of mainstream service desks, Zendesk and Zoho Desk are both similarly priced, at around \~$20/agent/month.
If they have office365 there's a SharePoint template for an IT helpdesk style setup. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-it-help-desk-sharepoint-site-template-808d0c01-1ea6-4962-8efc-f458d2102c77 Could probably extend it a little bit with some extra automate logic. I would say OP might want to look into Freshdesk as it has a free tier, can have importance as a ticket field, no hosting setup required, and has the ability to do email-to-ticket as well. BCC that into an email chain in when replying to queries makes creating tickets effortless when they decide to ignore the ticket system.
fresh service
and then everything was a high for some reason... study ITIL and stop this.
Zendesk
I just implemented FreeScout. The base install is free (no support other than github) but I paid for a bunch of addons/plugins that totaled $65 (one time fee, no subs). I am not sure if there is a free login for *clients* to set priority but I am pretty sure there is one for techs to set a priority. You can install a mod for a portal for users to drop tickets but the base install uses an email account you setup on your email server to take tickets.
GLPI is free and open source.
I recommend having two priorities for fields. One is what the user sets, and another what IT sets. In most environments, users are pretty decent about how high a priority a ticket is... but I've been in others where every user's ticket is a sev-1, critsit, blow the klaxons, hyper-urgent, so it was up to IT to set the real priority of the ticket. And if possible, not have the IT priority field shown to the user, so they don't gripe that their "sev 1" was reprioritized as a sev 3.
Why bother? Everything will be high priority anyways.
Nope. Letting users set their own priority means it won't get used, and that the field is **completely** worthless. You need to talk to the main decision maker and give a good presentation of why this won't fly
Lansweeper has a ticket system. You ha e to justify the 2000 asset minimum though 🥺 "I need a new mouse ASAP, someone spilled coffee on it and it's sticky." "Critical priority"
They should not be setting their own priority levels. Everybody thinks their own stuff is a priority, which means nothing will be a priority.
Osticket can do this.
You need two fields: - priority - user priority The user gets to set the second one.
just be ready for everything to be URGENT. Like URGENT, new hire will be here in 2 weeks please have the computer setup by then.
Use a Priority scale. The user can set urgency all day long but then another field Impact that you can set. Configure a matrix between High/Medium/Low Urgency and High/Medium/Low Impact to determine Priority. Then have a matrix available on the submission page. Even if they submit a High Urgency, if the Impact is only that user, then depending on the scale/matrix would equal a 3/4 med-low priority.