ProjecTrak Help Desk
With the constant change of technology and the endless "how do I do this?" type calls, it's impossible to manage help desk calls by hand, even in very small organizations. But before you select or upgrade a help desk package, you need to make sure that it not only fits your needs, but that it's designed to make the technicians' jobs more manageable and less complicated. They have enough stress as it is.

In this regard, I found that the ProjecTrak Help Desk offers the kind of high-end functionality one expects, yet it's designed in a way that a novice can quickly start creating tickets and taking care of callers. As a bonus, it also has some unusual and cool features, such as technician coaching, not found elsewhere.

The first step after receiving a help call is to enter the ticket details on the Help Ticket screen (shown in Figure A).

FIGURE A

Enter the ticket details on the Help Ticket screen. Click picture for a larger image.

Most of the fields on this and other screens are configurable to fit each specific site's requirements. For times where you don't have the answer to the user's problem, the AutoSolve button accesses the KnowledgeBases and walks you step by step in solving a problem. Once I entered a few topics, I realized how potentially powerful this part of ProjecTrak is, since the same problems occur over and over again within organizations. I actually found this feature to be much more intuitive than what I've seen in other software, where you can get lost in a labyrinth of irrelevant information before getting the answer you need.

Tickets can be escalated manually or automatically based on certain criteria, such as time open, priority, etc. For mobile technicians, notifications can be sent via email, pager, cell phone, or through the included PDA link. Actually, most of the ProjecTrak software in the suite has PDA integration, but I've found that most useful for the Help Desk.

In addition to helping clients directly, you probably know that you can dramatically reduce support costs by enabling your end users to solve their own problems. ProjecTrak Help Desk lets you do that in a cost-effective manner with real time end user-to-technician chat, access to KnowledgeBases, problem submission and updates, FAQs, and electronic communities for end users to support each other.