Tracker

Customer (web) Self Service Center. incident submission automatically searches knowledge base and suggests PERTENANT articles. Competing products do this but we have not seen any do it well.

Knowledgebase that inserts itself into the process but doesnt get in the way. Building the KB is very easy to do in the course of resolving incidents.

Very flexible tracking of contacts, contracts and time. We have resellers and end users. Tracker handles incidents submitted by either party and keeps everyone up to date.

Theyll host Tracker or let you put it on your own server. They have desktop, browser and smartphone versions.

We have not found any aspect of the program that we could not tweak. Users can modify reports, database (MS SQL), most screens in the application and the customer support center.

The system handles emails quite well. screen shots, file attachments and hyperlinks, etc.

We spent more time than we should have before going live. This really isnt PhaseWares fault. Its only listed as a CON because I wish their manual had an introduction that said Dive in; you can tweak it later.

In retrospect we also should have stuck more to their training (included with purchase) rather than digging in on our own but being in the SW biz we thought we could learn their stuff faster than they could learn ours. We were wrong. They have an incredible knack for understanding the many and varied ways people want to do business.

Easy to use for new hires to come up to speed quickly.

Some of the features from Demand were not ported over to Beyond. the ability to see past viewed tickets. The screen roles as you scroll up and down the journal entries. the search screen doe snot always clear out and some times you need to clear individual fields manually.

The PhaseWare team was responsive to every special need and request that we made, including some significant customizations to the program. They even set up a custom demo installation on their own servers, and left it active for testing and training during our entire implementation period. Every member of their team was intelligent, personable, and provided great customer service.

PhaseWare handles Tracker support using its own software - something we were surprised to find that some competitors don't do-- and their Self Service Center is highly usable with active community forums and great downloadable documentation. They include a Suggestions forum, and the newest version of Tracker includes many of those suggestions.

The software is scalable and reliable, and provides us flexibility to make changes that fit our workflow and reporting needs.

The Self Service Center is a bit blocky looking "out of the box" and is missing some features that are offered by many competitors (like "email this article" and "print" links, and rich text formatting in the knowledgebase). Creating "canned" responses and template incidents requires administrator level access, and the method of adding the canned snippets to support incidents in progress is cumbersome. No ability to manually sort field values or lists of downloads, FAQs, etc-- nearly all display alphabetically. There are limited tools available for ad hoc reporting/querying - the report designer requires programming knowledge.