r/sharepoint • u/Important_Durian5905 • Aug 31 '26
SharePoint Online what are small IT teams on M365 actually using for tickets these days?
Small shop, 5 of us doing IT for a few hundred users, all M365. Trying to figure out what people at our size actually run for a helpdesk because everything I look at is either overkill or per agent per month forever.
Also asking because I know at least two places that had some SharePoint based ticketing thing just stop loading in April when the add-in stuff got turned off, and they ended up on a shared mailbox again lol. One went to freshdesk, the other is still "figuring it out"
So far the answers I get are basically: shared mailbox, a sharepoint list someone built years ago that nobody wants to touch, freshdesk/zendesk/jira SM, one of the appsource ones (helpdesk 365, plumsail, steadypoint), or planner.
What I'm curious about
- what and why are you on and how long
- roughly what it costs you a year
- and does the per agent per month cost bug anyone else at our size or is that just me
Just want to hear what's actually working for people
Thx
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u/sam_ibrahim Aug 31 '26
Had almost the same setup with a client.
Five IT guys, a few hundred users, everyone already on E5.
Tickets coming in as Teams DMs and people grabbing you in the corridor.
They didn't buy anything. We built it in Power Apps over SharePoint lists.
Standard connectors only, so nothing on top of the E5 they were already paying for.
Mail hits the shared mailbox, a flow creates the ticket. Requester gets a confirmation, the team gets a link.
Replies land back on the same ticket instead of turning into six forwarded threads.
When a tech comments, changes status or closes it, the requester gets the email automatically.
Nobody has to remember to update anyone.
Techs also get reminders on tickets sitting too long against the SLA, so things stop quietly rotting in the queue.
And once a ticket is marked resolved, the requester gets a short feedback prompt.
That's where most of the useful data comes from, honestly.
Closed ticket counts tell you nothing about whether the fix actually landed.
Roles are coordinator (assigns, and the SLA clock starts there).
Technician sees his own queue and take action or require resources.
Admin sets SLA rules and manages users.
Manager view shows who's drowning and who's not.
Their branding, dark mode, the usual.
On your questions.
It was a one-time build, then nothing recurring after that.
No per seat, no renewal. They've been running it a year and half now. Data stays in their own tenant.
Canvas apps and Lists are a different model, none of that touched them.
The two places you know got burned by the delivery mechanism, not by SharePoint itself.
And no, it's not just you.
Per agent per month at five agents means you're funding a feature set you'll use maybe a fifth of.
But I'll be straight about the tradeoff.
Freshdesk means someone else owns uptime and patching.
Custom means you, or whoever built it, own it forever.
If nobody in your five is going to maintain it, that matters more than the licence cost does.
Anyway, happy to go into detail on the build if that's useful to anyone.
DM if interested
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u/Almondragon Aug 31 '26
Is each reply from the customer and each response from the technician a single list item all with the same ticket number then? Cheers
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u/sam_ibrahim Aug 31 '26
Yes i design it to have the same view as any ticketing system
It catches the replies and keep it inside the same ticket instead of creating dozens of tickets
I included merge ticket as well in case the requester created another ticket by mistake
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u/issy_haatin Aug 31 '26
Depends on your requirements really.
At base a simple list with some 'list forms' can probably cover quite a bit of ticketing needs.
Looking at our own ticketting system it usually boils down to: what type of service or offering is it about? Is it a problem, a question, a change request? And then a basic title and what it's about field. For certain services more information is requested in the form.
We use payed system for our it ticketting, but we also have automatic assignments / routing / first line / second / third for a it department of 70 people. Oh we also have a post resolution feedback option and our entire company structure and contacts in it.
For a a 5 man team id imagine its a: everyone handles every request kind off thing so you just need to know who is having the problem and hopefully a decent message of what is going wrong.
So a list with a rule for alerting, with an 'assigned to' field should be enough really.
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u/Suhail-Sayed Aug 31 '26
I use RapidStart CRM. Costs $15/user/month. ($5 to Microsoft for the Power Apps per App license and $10 for the RapidStart license)
Another option is Frappe Helpdesk (0 license cost).
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u/Twilko Aug 31 '26
As you think ServiceNow would be overkill, then might be worth with getting a trial of something more lightweight like NinjaOne Ticketing. Has the basics like SCIM, SSO, MFA, and you can extend the basic features quite a bit with automations (and then can extend those further by having automations send an email to a shared mailbox to trigger a Power Automate flow for further processing / reporting).
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u/Zom2016 Aug 31 '26
Microsoft DevOps, free, using for 5+ years.
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u/4lteredBeast Aug 31 '26
Did you have to customise much to get it to work as an ITSM tool?
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u/Zom2016 Aug 31 '26
If you only need a ticketing system - no.
Else depens on your requirements.1
u/4lteredBeast Sep 02 '26
I'm currently building out some script and IaC repos, so it would be good to use for ticketing as well, if possible!
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Aug 31 '26
I use Forms/Power automate/Sharepoint List and have for about 5 years.
We were paying something like $12k every two years for licenses for another system (sysaid) and it was hated. It had way too many questions to submit a ticket, way too many questions to close a ticket. IT basically didn't use it, and our users didn't use it.
I sat down and decided to basically fuck around and see what my capabilities were with Sharepoint and created a ticketing system over the course of a couple of days that I've done a bit to over the years but hasn't been changed much other than a few changes here and there.
I have no idea why some of these would stop working in April, unless the person who created it and the power automate flows left the company in which case thats a good reason why they'd stop working and you'd just need to recreate the flows.
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u/chillzatl Aug 31 '26
If you have the skillset and bandwidth, you can make something in Sharepoint that will work well for you.
But I have neither the bandwidth nor the desire to support something like that... We use NinjaOne for systems management (combined with Intune) and the ticketing functionality included in it are completely sufficient for our 2300 employees. Our ticketing setup is far from basic as well. We have multiple app support groups using it beyond just our main service desk. Well worth the roughly $2/user/month that we pay.
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u/dicotyledon Aug 31 '26
I used a SP list with content types for multiple different forms on one list for about 10 years before my org mandated everyone had to use ServiceNow. Worked perfectly fine. Power Automate for the emails.
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u/Gh0styD0g Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Supportpal, cheap, multi department, database access for bespoke reporting, automation, and you can connect your own ai if you choose. One price monthly, unlimited agents, users, departments. Did I mention it’s cheap?
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u/Automatic-Builder353 Aug 31 '26
I am at a much larger firm so we use ServiceNow but there is a Helpdesk template in SharePoint.
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u/NedStarky51 Aug 31 '26
At an organization of nearly 5,000. While we have a ticketing system for help desk, nearly every unit in our organization is now wanting some kind of "intake" system, each one customized to their needs.
I've done several either form->list item-> power automate with approvals or intake form is a power app depending on needs.
Latest wants submitter/agent to be able to correspond through the ticket.
Im not sure how that will look yet.
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u/deepthought16 Aug 31 '26
I built a self hosted app that logs tickets for my end users and brings everything into one pane of glass because there really isn’t anything out there for small it teams that doesn’t cost a fair amount and SharePoint is limited
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u/AlphaHotelBravo Sep 01 '26
Maybe consider also how you will manage your contracts? How will you log tech time against tickets? What about an element of CRM for marketing and sales? Integration with other network management systems?
I'm not advocating going to the big players in the MSP business management field; just noticing that no-one here (I think) has mentioned adopting a system which will help you pro-actively drive your business over and above reacting to tickets.
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u/trvp6od Aug 31 '26
I've always wanted to try Lists out with a Forms front end for the user. Since we have over 1,000 employees under our "roof" (thousands more for the whole company), we use ServiceNow. Don't know the cost of SN but I can reckon it's a hefty penny.
I was interested though in using Lists as a Ticketing system. Lists has Flows built in (do this when this is created, modified, deleted, etc) and you can also build Power Automate flows that will run off of that one persons PA license. Example of PA, when Created Date has been over 7 days, send an reminder email to Assisnged To