Does anyone have any comments on the usefulness of OnTime for a company's general Help Desk support team? By general, I mean not (necessarily) related to the company's software products. For example, an accountant is having trouble with his phone, and wants to report the trouble to the Help Desk. The Help Desk Manager wants to be able to assign the incident and track it's completion, make reports, etc.

Our company might be in the market for a bug tracking system AND a Help Desk tool. It would be very interesting to know whether OnTime could handle both needs.

 Thanks.

 -Kurt

Hello Kurt,

I can tell you from my own experience that I truly enjoy using OnTime here in our Axosoft support department.

We have an email account configured to create Incidents from support emails, and we receive Incidents from our customer's Customer Portal entries as well. We can easily query all open Incidents, and filter or sort them in a variety of different ways in order to see which items are assigned to whom, and which items are pending, etc. It allows me to sort our tickets and use filters to be able to see which items I have open, and it really makes my day and my workload easier. Email notifications are invaluable in communicating to me the status of my pending support Incidents.

I can't comment too much on reporting, as I haven't used many of our reports myself in our Support environment. OnTime doesn't ship with a large number of built-in reports, and that's because we have such a variety of customers from so many different work environments that we couldn't hope to have reports for everyone. Instead, we offer some basic reports and we allow you to build Custom Reports using .NET ActiveReports. That way, you can design custom reports that will show you exactly what you need them to show you.

I'm sure I could go one forever listing specific ways that OnTime helps me throughout the day, and how useful it is here in our Axosoft support department.

But I really must be getting back to OnTime to answer those support Incidents.. :)

I recommend trying OnTime out for yourself. You can download a free single-user version of OnTime, or even a 30-day team trial from our download page:
http://www.axosoft.com/products/downloads.aspx 

I'll second the opinion, Kurt. We use OnTime to manage several regional offices from Dubai to Hong Kong, as well as our Australian office (where I'm based), using OnTime for call management.

We're using an ITIL-based process which classes calls into Incidents, Changes (eg. Features) and Issues (aka bugs). All calls come in as Incidents, and are then triaged by the Support Desk. If a call relates to new functionality it's cloned to Changes, if a defect to Issues. The workflow automation allows us to track what stage calls are at, to enforce mandatory information to be keyed in by the person handling the call, to track the work hours expended, and to drive the sort of business intelligence reporting our bar-graph besotted upper management crave. The users have adopted OnTime well, with no more than the expected resistance which occurs when people are ... encouraged, shall we say, to work in a more formatted, organised manner.

We're a SQL house here, so we've ignored the OnTime report tools to use MS Reporting Services, which lets us churn out more or less anything that can be specified, depending on how much time we want someone to spend on playing with queries & tables.

We had a look at a number of other support desk packages, including some tens of times more expensive. OnTIme hits a happy medium between the cheaper "here's a pile of parts, build whatever you want" solutions, and the "please book ten hotel rooms for the implementation team" higher-end packages.

Cheers,

John H