Equipping Your Helpdes k: 4 Products To The Rescue Generally speaking, you must distinguish between prepackaged content (from companies such as ServiceWare or Knowledge Brokers) and search engines. At the bottom of the search engines are those that essentially do text searching (usually with Boolean operations and some kind of intelligent indexing). Then come the decision trees, case-based retrieval (CBR) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Decision trees, built of simple yes/no conditions, are useful mainly in solving simple, common or well-defined problems. CBR tools are based on pattern matching and tend to be aimed at second-level support specialists. The agent describes a problem and the system does an intelligent search of the database to find and rank other cases that seem similar. Embedde d artificial intelligence (AI) systems often make use of multiple approaches, sometimes transparently, to increase the likelihood of quickly finding the right response. The four products we evaluated have a significant number of customers (given the nature of the middle market) and include one or more kinds of expert system plus various additional modules. We zeroed in on key helpdesk functions--administration, security and utilities; call logging and tracking; customizability; integration with other products; performance; problem resolution; and reporting--and evaluated how well each of these products fulfilled these needs. HEAT, from an administrator's perspective, looks like any complex database system. It is highly customizable at both the database level and the screen-design level. It comes with starter setups to give you a hint of how you can customize it. The tools for creating tables and screens are fairly easy to use. SupportMagic is without a doubt the most complete package in the group. SupportMagic includes easy call logging, strong escalation options, a highly configurable database and the best documentation. But it uses nonstandard Windows screen-handling conventions (for example, a check mark in the u pper right-hand corner equals OK) that can be very irritating. TOM's cognitive processing engine is extraordinarily interesting and makes it fairly easy not only to add knowledge but also to build a knowledge base for noncomputer-related functions. But it was the most difficult product we tested to customize and, overall, it probably has the least sophisticated call tracking and escalation features. Utopia 3.0 was somewhat shaky when we tested it in November, and it is the least customizable of these products. In addition, it was the only product for which we could not obtain even a sample of its knowledge base (CasePoint). However, its tables are well designed and the call logging functions are easy to use and strong. Administration, Security, Utilities It should be possible to do a certain amount of system administration, such as adding an agent, while the helpdesk software is in use. For major changes, especially to fundamental system components, you should be able to work on a copy or save a test version so that you need to kick people off only briefly to commit the change. This is how HEAT works. SupportMagic, on the other hand, won't even let you run the administration module if somebody is working in the system, and changes in Utopia always affect the production tables and screens (a shutdown option exists). TOM will let you save changes to a local copy (if you've set the system up that way) or as a template, but the latter, especially, is an awkward solution; your inclination is to look for a "save as" button. None of the products offers an easy way to do a live test of your changes before rolling them out, although HEAT does offer a precommit verify. HEAT and SupportMagic have separate administration modules; SupportMag ic also has a separate database module. With TOM and Utopia, administrative tasks are part of the main module with access controlled by security. All have multiple separate external modules for different system functions. TOM has th e most unusual security setup. You assign arbitrary letters to a particular form and action, such as add, change or delete, then assign up to six letters to each consultant. The others take a more traditional approach. SupportMagic focuses on group security at the view level, and a user who hasn't been assigned to a group can't log on. Users can be members of more than one group and, for some things, can be given fewer rights than the group as a whole. HEAT also relies on group-level security and assigns different rights to selected security items. In Utopia, members can be part of more than one group but need not belong to any. But its interactive tool for assigning rights is clumsy. For add or edit functions, you can assign all, read-only or hidden attributes.

Internet Platform: Pick a Winner by Dan Backman Updated January 24, 1997