GoToMeeting thoughts
Posted by: David
Why use go to meeting?
- Cut your costs. No longer do you need to go out and do training, or invite people to your buildings to train them on your software. Simply host a webinar and invite all of the attendees to watch and listen from their comfort. No more travel fees! Sometimes you can't avoid travel, but there isn't much a great power point couldn't help with.
- Remote tools. If you need to support some helpless person who you have more trouble than ever with in giving remote assistance, gotomeeting is really simple. You don't need their IP, or hostname, just make sure they can read their e-mail, and send them an e-mail invitation. Change the presenter to them so you can see their screen and request control of their machine to start working on it.
- Simple. Even some of your more simple minded employees or customers can figure out how to use it. If they can't figure it out the first time, the help and manual for gotomeeting provides a great resource tool to get it. If you don't get gotomeeting, you don't get much. Sorry.
Some problems
- When things go wrong, they really go wrong. Hosting a webinar? Easy enough right? Well, not if you change the conference phone number without alerting half of your attendees. Make sure you keep all stakeholders informed on what is going on when you are hosting webinars, specially if they are more important than most.
- Requires a software download. The hardest part about getting a helpless remote user help is walking them through the install. If someone is completely helpless, then you know how hard it can be to walk them through installing something. This can be a bear, but if you are dealing with someone who knows how to use their computer, it should only take a minute or two (depending on connection).
- Chaotic. Get 70 people on your webinar with a teleconference. You sure are saving a lot of money, but you know how people can be. They refuse to mute their phone and you can hear them talking in the background. You can mute them from your gotomeeting, but whenever someone joins you need to keep reminding them or mute everyone. At time it can definetly be inconvenient.
Overall Thoughts
Gotomeeting is good software. It was excellent software to organize your web meeting, and with the use of a conference line can get confusing at time, but offers power that you use to only dream about. It cuts your travel costs a ton. Move that money in your budget to give you employees new monitors and ergonomic keyboards so they can be more comfortable working.
As long as you keep everyone informed, and are willing to help people who aren't familiar with computer gotomeeting can be very helpful. It is when you start having issues that things can get very bad very fast. Chaotic was a good word for it. Once things get bed they tend to stay bad for a while. Things get disorganized quickly. Game plan before you start, and be prepared for anything. If you are prepared, gotomeeting can be a great asset, otherwise it can be a complete hassle.
Before you start using gotomeeting corporate wide, make sure you have people who are familiar with using the software to be able to give some support. You should do this with all software really. However with something as important as web meetings with Chief Officers, it is particularly important you have someone on staff who knows how to lend a hand if something were to go wrong.
Spiceworks review – from the help desk guy
Posted by: David
Overall Help Desk Score - 7/10
Spiceworks is a very robust networking system. It does a lot of work for your IT department and has a lot of available resources that allow you to customize it to fit your needs. The help desk/ticketing system in spiceworks is not very bad either. Although since Spiceworks is not exclusively a ticketing system is lacks some core necessities for help desk ticketing systems.
I'll start with the positives.
Positives:
- Easy to use and navigate
- Customizable reports
- Integration with Microsoft Active Directory
- Good user interface for those receiving tickets.
Spiceworks is very easy for the help desk to use and navigate. Once you have it set up for your Help Desk the usage of it is very simple and customizable. If you don't like the ticket categories that spiceworks comes with you can designate your own to meet your companies needs. This also means that you don't have to use this for only IT purposes. If you wanted you could have your entire company have a Spiceworks logon and have them document their work by using the ticketing system.
The customizable reports are amazing. If you have one person in your staff who can work with SQLite and understand the database table structure for Spiceworks you can really start to breakdown your tickets. I personally have made a customizable report for our Help Desk that lets us know who has done the most tickets so far during the month. Since spiceworks allows you to run reports as widgets on the dashboard, all of the help desk can see how they are performing compared to the others. It really keeps the workplace very competitive, but only in a friendly nature. (You can find that report on SpiceWorks Community, it is called "This Month Tickets".)
The integration with our Windows network was also amazing. Now whenever we have problems everything is almost completely automated when people submit their e-mails for tickets. We do the work, the only tickets we have to manually enter in information for is when we get direct calls from users.
Spiceworks has also done a lot of work in updates recently allowing HTML e-mail responses to ticket actions. In the Spiceworks control settings you can change the template to match your corporate colors or customize it to have an appropriate message or even tell Spiceworks when to send e-mails if they are necessary.
Negatives:
- Slow web based controls
- Editing tickets is not easy
- Hard to navigate to see all tickets
Now while Spiceworks has more Positives than negatives, these negatives are rather crucial.
The slow web based controls really slow down timing. When you are on the phone with a user and you need to type information while they are talking it isn't ok to be waiting on the controls to react. When you need to type you need to type fast. Also, the controls are so slow at times that when you make changes you can click on something else and the changes not take effect. The database shouldn't be that slow, the controls on the website are slowing it down so much that sometimes the database changes never get made when you navigate away after making ticket changes.
Now, in the past editing tickets used to be really easy. Now it is incredibly inconvenient. In the past all of the ticket information could be edited at the top of the notes for the ticket. Now you have to hit edit and wait for it to load the editing screen. Once the editing screen is up you have to hit save to return to the notes section. It was much better in the past when all you had to do was edit whatever you wanted for the ticket on one screen.
Also, in the Help Desk ticketing you can't just see someone's tickets by navigating to them. You have to look at all open or all closed tickets or just your own or unassigned tickets. Sometimes you need to look at another persons tickets without sorting through hundreds of other tickets. This is where the customizable reports saves Spiceworks because you can find them with the customizable reports, but you shouldn't have to create a report in Spiceworks just to be able to view someone's tickets in particular.
In review of the review:
Spiceworks is a very flexible and robust system. It's ticketing system however is slow and could use some more features. Once the speed and features of the ticketing system are updated the ticketing system will be hard to beat. I gave the software a 7/10 on its ticketing system because it obviously has a ways to go but for a starting system it has a great start and has a great development team that has always made some good improvements with each update.