I have been testing out Service Desk for a few days now.  I have found it lacking in a few areas.  Now perhaps I'm missing something, if so please advise.

My environment is simple.  Four techs and no budget.  My goal is to get some stake holder buy-in to add some functionality of the Support Center solution and keep it all within a single system.  That way I should be able to secure funding.

Right now I'm testing Service Desk on a Windows server.  I have also tested the install on CentOS connecting to a MS SQL db and all seems to work.

I want the techs to have access to only certain types of tickets, and i got that working with Support Groups.

Everything sound simple, and on the surface Service Desk can handle it.  Here are the issues I have:

1)  It seems Service Desk really pushes the instant assigning of tickets (Automatic Dispatch). With some ticket types I can see this being of good use.  But the over all I want my techs to log in and pick up tickets.  I do not want to auto assign any of them.  The challenge is; the SD home page sucks with this model.

- - - The home page does not list unassigned tickets waiting for the tech to pick up.  The tech must go into the "Requests" section and find any unassigned tickets.

- - - Doesn't seem to be a way to pull a count of unassigned tickets out of the API.

2) Lacks the ability to disable "Solutions"  I would just like to disable it.  Already have another solution for it.

3) Why so restrictive with "Requester Details" in the Incident Templates? You can not customize the box at all.  I don't need Job Title or Department.  I can see where at times it can be of use, but I would prefer to hide it completely.

4) Active Directory Import with no group filters.  I don't want to create a requester account for everyone in an OU.  It would need to have a group filter.

5) LDAP authentication.  Ok so for filters I can use LDAP auth... nope. There doesn't seem to be support for ldaps.  And I so hope I'm wrong on this one, if not I don't know how anyone can take your software seriously. I could go on a rant here but I wont.  I will say that after finding this out the software came very close to the "Why bother" list.

6) Tasks are not checklists. A task would be to fill out a checklist.  So I would have to find a way to make tasks work by changing our processes or find a way to work check lists into tasks.

7) Unable to disable the scheduler.  

8) Minor Annoyance.  The * to indicate mandatory field is inconsistent to which side of the text it it on.

I'm hoping I'm wrong on these issues and that by posting my comments someone will be kind enough to correct me.

Now enough of the complaints.  My goal is to find a single solution that I can tweak to fit my needs.  If I can do that I wont mind begging for funds.  Right now my options are to continue testing SD (but the LDAP issue leaves a bad taste in regards to ZoHo's position on security) or implement separate systems for each need. 

I have been using OpManager for years now, and while there are many free options out there I still prefer OpM.  That and features such as; support for email aliases, a customer portal, Active Directory support, Linux server installer, email to ticket, API, and a free version all sparked interest in the product.