If you are to buy a HelpDesk & Asset Management software, see the following checklist before you decide on one.

Comprehensive Help Desk Functionality

A good Help Desk product can dramatically rise the productivity of the Help Desk Personnel (which in turn will rise the organisation's productivity as a whole). Computer users can be made to submit their requests by mail, phone or through the web interface provided by the product. These requests gathered centrally will be attended to by technicians (who already are automatically notified about the request). Adding memos/notes to the requests & viewing the history of Requests can help too.

Buildable Knowledge Base (KB)

Even before a complaint is registered, Users can be made to search a prebuilt KB which will result in time savings for the Help Desk Personnel. The KB will also result in increasing the first call resolutions. The Help Desk personnel should be able to add on to, edit & delete from the existing KB.

Asset Managenment

What is considered here as an organisation's Assets are typical hardware components like PCs, Printers, Scanners etc & Licensed Software like MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. The product should allow these assets to be well tracked & their records to be maintained - from their purchase till end-of-life. It should also allow easy software license tracking which will contribute to a significant cost saving for the organisation.

Contracts (AMCs) Management

Most hardware components in an IT organisation come under some Annual Maintenance Plan. The product you choose should allow you to create & maintain various AMCs with the various vendors. If the product reminds you days before a contract ends (say, through an auto-generated email), it will be an added advantage.

Purchasing

Your IT department is constantly in need of spendable Hardware (floppies, CDs, printer ribbons, printers, PCs etc) and software. All these needs will be typically taken care by a separate Purchase Department. Seamless tracking between the two departments is an essentiality which will result in getting the required needs on schedule & their optimal use. Also, see whether the product you choose lets you mail the Purchase Orders to Vendors & track them too.

Out-of-the-box

The product installation should go on like a breeze. Moreover, it should be put into operation with nil to minimum initial configuration & all the features should be inbuilt with no extra development effort.

User friendly UI

The product you are looking at should have a very user friendly client interface as it'll be used by all employees in your organisation. The UI should be simple & at the same time offer easy-to-use features. If the product is web enabled, it'll make things much more easier - any user can login from anywhere using just a browser.

Pricing & Licensing

Most Help Desk products in the market are prohibitively costly with many hidden costs associated with them. Coupled with this, the products' licensing models can be tedious to understand & implement. Make sure the product you choose offers affordable pricing with an easy licensing model.

AdventNet's ServiceDesk Plus offers to solve all the above & has much more to offer. The product is available at a very affordable price starting from $495 & there's a Free Edition too that can manage 25 Workstations. For further information, mail to sales@adventnet.com or visit http://www.servicedeskplus.com

Natarajan Aravind
Market Analyst
AdventNet,Inc.
http://www.servicedeskplus.com