Replacing service desk with a custom front end

[Aristedes Maniatis]

Our service desk plugin is up for renewal again and I'm thinking about alternatives. Service Desk is very limited and quite expensive for what it does, so I'm thinking about writing a React front end instead.

Advantages

* custom UI with our branding instead of advertising Atlassian

* integration with our documentation for self-help (Jira only supports Confluence)

* More flexible steps for collecting data from customer

* More flexible access rights (the way Atlassian implemented customer companies per project with no LDAP integration sucks)

What do we lose without the ServiceDesk plugin?

* inbound/outbound email: we already use a third party plugin Email This Issue which is much better

* queues: we already use Divinti Queues which is much better

* "created linked issue": yes, that one little menu item is very useful

What am I missing here? Have others gone down this path?

I'm guessing we'll need to write some middleware to provide an API to the front end, because customers cannot use the API with their own login. But in all I'm estimating 10 days work. Is there some reason this isn't going to work?