By Steve Young, CIO Advisor
In a previous post, I mentioned the need for overworked school IT staff of a top-notch help desk system. I also laid out what my staff and I felt were the major features we needed from a system to help our staff provide better and more efficient service to our customers.
I usually shy away from writing outright product recommendations, but given how great of a product we ended up with, I wanted to be sure and share this with other school districts and any other growing IT department that has needs that go beyond a basic help desk ticketing system.
After many months of requirements gathering, web research, and product demos, we ended up selecting our new service desk, iSupport. iSupport is only in the business of selling and supporting its awesome help desk offering. The company does one thing and does it extremely well. And lest you think they stole the name from that other “i” company, iSupport has been in the help desk business a very long time and focuses on making a very good product better with every release.
I am not going to get into the feature set of the product; let me just say it is robust and more configurable than almost any product I have ever seen. There is almost always a way to make this system fit your needs and processes. And if you can’t figure it out, the BEST tech support I have received is just a phone call away. If you want to know about features and functions, try visiting their site, requesting a trial, or perusing some of their YouTube videos.
Our implementation of iSupport is not done. We have a great start with incident management, a parts store, parts charging, knowledgebase, end user portal, automated reporting, and several custom incident templates, email notifications, and more. Next up we are looking to roll out a service catalog and purchasing handbook. The great part is that we are able to move almost all of our customer interaction right into iSupport, so that they have only one place to go when in need of assistance. At the end of the day, providing our customers the best service possible is our goal, and iSupport is helping us to do that better.
Steve Young is CTO of Judson ISD in Texas and founder of the San Antonio Area Technology Directors group. He blogs at CTO Technotes, where this is cross posted. Follow him on Twitter as @atemyshorts.
