Powerful but confusing ticket manager

Once we got our heads around the rather clunky and busy UI we've realized just how useful JIRA is. It's now the Universities ticket manager of choice and is used by every member of support staff. No other ticket manager (that we've found) comes close to the features offered by JIRA.

Pros

JIRA offers a huge amount of features, from simple support tickets to project workflow planning. Our method of project management (agile) works brilliantly with this, we're able to assign work in 'Sprints' that match our real working week. The ability to link JIRA with other 3rd party applications is excellent, we've integrated it with our content management system and QA / testing software. The wide use of JIRA makes communicating with other organisations much easier, most support companies are at least registered here.

Cons

The pricing is rather expensive, its not too much of a problem for a large institution such as ours, but for smaller businesses this may be too much. The user-interface and general layouts really aren't intuitive, for a new user it takes a while to get their head around the various features and processes. It took a few weeks for even the more experienced developers to get used to it.

Efficient service desk for companies small, medium or large

Prior to using Jira Service Desk, were using a combination of Excel and SharePoint with workflows. We couldn't get great reports. It was hard to customize. Workflows broke without a reason because, you know, it's SharePoint. And the entire process of serving customers was dead slow. We brought in Jira Service Desk as a test bed. Within 2 hours, we were testing and customers were putting in tickets. While we used most of the default settings, the value we were generating was way beyond we ever had. Then, we set up SLAs and watch reports for a few days. We were able to see everything we wanted - who reported the issue, when, what was the priority, how many comment exchanges happened, how much time did we spend, did we meet SLAs, what was the solution, etc. Fast forward 2 years. We are now able to create strategies to service internal and external customers better based on the data from Jira. It has helped us go from making gut-feel decisioning to data-centric decisioning. Good data wins debates. Jira helped us with good data. We are also utilizing Jira's excellent searching, dashboarding and API functionality to feed data to other systems and drive changes beyond just customers.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Cannot Manage Our Own Users

JIRA customer support has been extremely unhelpful. Several tickets and requests have been issued (from several customers) in their customer portal with no response or solutions offered.

Pros

I loved this software when we first implemented. We were able to mass upload our users, use custom user IDs, set their passwords, and link their email address through a simple file upload. We were also able to change their email addresses, and edit their names as needed.

Cons

Over time, JIRA has made changes to the service that have led us to terminate our service. We are no longer able to edit anything but our users full name. We cannot change their email addresses to meet business needs, nor can we assign them a user ID - instead having to incorporate their ID into their name in order for us to find them in the system the service desk was designed for.

A great option for on-site ICT service desk management

Overall we are very happy with Jira Service Desk; it has allowed us to provide a higher level of support to users than our previous service desk, and non-profit pricing was very beneficial for us. The software is usable in its default setup but we have found that there is still plenty of customisation that can be done if needed to suit more complex requirements.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Ok start, missing some key features

We have a ticket workflow for IT, so things are being tracked now.

Pros

Integration with other Atlassian products. Allowed us to start tracking IT issues and requests without having to bring on yet another tool.

Cons

Would like to be able to more effectively roll out custom support portals for our users, but no native support for custom URLs makes this more difficult. It's too easy for customers to browse around and find portals for other customers.