Caution must prevail not just when choosing the product but also when choosing your helpdesk solution provider. As the stock market giants have proven over the last year, being big certainly isn't a security in today's markets.

Why are there so many helpdesk systems on the market today?. Whilst there has always been a reasonable selection to choose from, they were quite an expensive investment. With the onset of the Internet and Intranet people soon realised that here was a platform that could deliver the form filling requirements of a call logging and tracking system. Although starting from a basic form filling exercise these have been developed into sophisticated applications. 

This sat mostly in the hands of the web developers who created the technical initiative as part of their consultancy fees. This slowly came in house as IT technicians mastered the techniques for writing html and Active Server Pages. They soon replaced the spreadsheet driven home grown support solution. Meanwhile the established helpdesk providers continued to focus on reaping the cash rewards for their advanced applications and did not see the creeping tide of change. They have  now received their wake up call. 

As we move into the next phase of the Intranet applications solutions developments the original main players are busy 'web enabling' there existing offerings. Other more adventurous survivalists have completely rewritten their applications for the browser market. An expensive task that some appear to be attempting to recover rapidly using the same pricing model as their original non web solution. 

This rapid development of a final solution to replace an existing offering is not without risks. Despite claims of customer input the real proof of an application is in it's practical use.  This takes time and there are already solutions out there that have overcome these hurdles. It is now possible to buy a browser based solution for a price of one years maintenance of an existing system.  It is advisable to establish how long the product has been on the market and how many people actually use that version. Most vendors are making claims of customer numbers based on their original non web solution. Get the facts and talk to a reference site.

What is a web enabled helpdesk? ASP pages provide a mechanism for accessing a database via the browser. Those that have a non proprietary database have the opportunity to rewrite the user interfaces in ASP and present them via a browser. Merely reproducing an out of date  Windows application in ASP is not the way forward. The web has introduced new ways of working and the application needs to be consistent with these and provide an integrated web solution

As the web based market matures we will see a number of the failing web application providers too. Caution should prevail when making a selection. Only those companies that match their business model to the web and take full advantage of the cost saving benefits them selves will be able to keep their overheads low enough to compete in today's price driven market.