JIRA Service Management

From the same company of my favorite and trusted apps like Trello and Jira... We then gave Jira Service Desk a try. The user interface has a modern look and feel and is intuitive enough even for a novice user or admin. It has a pretty standard set of tools to run your usual IT Helpdesk and Support roles straight out of the box (Incident management, Problem, Change, SLA management, etc.). In fact, you can set up your helpdesk well within an hour (of course not counting the per company nitty-gritty). Default setup works, but it's also super customizable based on your company needs. The Dashboard has all the at-a-glance metrics, statistics and graphs to keep you up to speed with the overall status.

Again, coming from Atlassian, it has a ton of possibilities in terms of integration with other apps. I feel the constant stream of dev improvements and updates.

Even though I mentioned that the third party apps can be easily integrable, we find the documentation for creating one's own integration apps a bit lacking. Also, the creation of tickets can be more streamlined or simplified (perhaps with the minimum number of fields and button clicks) to make it easier or faster to create and then further details can follow.

Well here's a tool that does everything, SD, incidents, KB, alerts, yes, it does a bit or everything.

It's awfull at doing things good. The new projects are barely compatible with new solutions, incidents and request are not configured correctly and can hardly be put in the same ticketing catalog. No advanced roadmaps (premium feature) in next gen projects. Automations are bad, tickets custom fields are sometimes not uderstood by the automation.

I find the UI of Jira Service Desk very clean and modern compared to other service desks software on the market. Included with the service desk is a customisable user-facing portal for users to raise tickets in, which proved very popular with staff when raising tickets alongside traditional email tickets. Due to the way Jira splits service desks into different projects, we were able to create service desks for other departments in the organisation which helped improve productivity and workflow. There are some very useful and well-designed default reports included for ticket statistics (which can be used to keep management happy!). We found the default setup of Jira Service Desk fit our needs very well, but it is very easy to customise ticket workflows and other features to suit more complex needs.

For a service desk technician using Jira Service Desk the back-end UI for managing tickets can be a little overwhelming, however this can be fixed by editing the default workflows for tickets to hide not required information and details. The administration settings are somewhat unintuitively set out for system administrators, but once you get to grips with the layout it becomes easy enough to find what you need from the settings page. We found the instructions on the Atlassian website for setting up an external redirect with a custom URL in IIS a little sparse on detail, but a quick trip to the Atlassian forums cleared up any queries we had with the process.

Jira Service Desk was very easy to get started with. You could literally sign up for it and begin using it within an hour. Ticketing system is very customizable and powerful. Customers can be added in bulk and customers can sign up for entering issues. We were able to create different projects (or service queues) so that customers could send requests for IT help, or administrative help, or help with projects. Each such project/queue had different fields. Metrics are all built into the software, so we can know how often Service Level Agreements were breached, who breached them etc. The sheer amount of customizability is a joy. However, without discipline and thoughtfulness, it is very easy to customize it the wrong way.

We feel that the price point could be lower and the speed could be a little faster. Atlassian has made improvements with speed. If a company had 5 people manning different queues and the issue volume is low, the cost would be ~1500/year for those 5 users. So, it would may not be cost effective for a small company that is watching their costs closely. We also felt that a Wiki is not built in. So, if a common solution needs to documented that spans multiple tickets, there's no way to do so. We could buy Confluence from Atlassian for an additional cost.