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Giving up my mod points to recommend Cerberus

Anyway, it's PHP/MySQL - they went away from "optimized" (obscured) PHP code years ago, so the source is there - the user forums have a custom mods area, and they have a single-email-address version that's free. It was pretty cheap when we bought it for multi-domains as well. The only part that's closed soruce is the email parser that checks the license key as it receives email to turn into tickets.

Here's the product website

I am a big fan of the cerberus system. http://www.cerberusweb.com./ It's a fully featured system and depending on your needs you can use the free version of it. If your company is just you and a few other people. you might like to give it a try.

It's not Free, but you might want to check out Cerberus Helpdesk. They've got a free (beer) version that's subject to some limitations. We considered using it at my last job (before settling on another solution.)

It's not Free, but you might want to check out Cerberus Helpdesk. They've got a free (beer) version that's subject to some limitations. We considered using it at my last job (before settling on another solution.)

It's hard to say what issue tracking system you'll need without knowing what you'll be using it for.

If you're looking at using it for tech/customer support and sales issues, take a look at Cerberus Helpdesk. It's a commercial offering, but at work we decided on it because it has a number of features that we found convenient (great e-mail integration, bayesian spam filtering, built-in knowledgebase management, etc.) which I was unable to find matched in any [fF]ree offerings. A 3-seat commercial license is free, a 5-seat license is $400, so it doesn't have to save us too much time to pay for itself.

If you're looking for bug tracking, there are about a million decent offerings. I personally like Flyspray. It's not as feature-rich as some other systems like Bugzilla or Trac, but I found that half the candy in those doesn't really become useful until you're dealing with lots of developers and issues. I was using Flyspray to coordinate just a couple developers and 5 or 6 testers, and it was more than up to the task.

We use cerberus at work. (University) http://www.cerberusweb.com/ http://www.cerberusweb.com/free_version.php RT is nice too if you got peeps that will work with it to make it work for you.

Check out http://cerberusweb.com/. We used it as ticketing system at a former company.

• was able to get it up and running in the few days you have
• was flexible enough to cover most of our demands (escalation, resolution times, email integration, etc)
• was pretty cheap (
• had an active/responsive development staff

(standard disclaimer: I do not work for the company that produces this product or have any affiliation with them other than as a satisfied former user)

Cerberus Help Desk. There's a pretty simple web GUI, or you can tell your users to email issues to a support mail address and it'll enter them into the tracking system automatically. There's a free version that's 100% functional, except that it's limited to a single email address/ticket queue. For your purposes that sounds like that's enough.

remove items like "Reply to All"

One of the reasons (aside from CYA protection) that I prefer to have anything related to tasks go through our Cerberus Helpdesk installation: it munges the Reply-To header (normally a terrible idea, but in an office of Outlook-breathers there's not really a lot of choice) meaning that no matter how hard they try, all involved are kept apprised of the progress of relevant issues.

Face it... in most cases replying to the group is appropriate. There are 2 reasons people tend to have a problem with this:

• They use an extremely unprofessional tone and make personal remarks, and don't like to take their audience into account (even I, never known for my interpersonal skills, am very deliberate when using the corporate email; sometimes not always politic, but always deliberate).
• They don't like having to think, even for a split second, before pouncing on that button. Hence the spate of "sent to someone with a similar-seeming name" problems, as well.

2 of the three I recommend have already been mentioned. RT and Fogbugz.

The last one is Cerberus Help Desk which is what we picked in the end. It's not free but it is low cost. Basically it's designed for help desk work instead of the more generic request tracking.

What does that mean? Well you can:
*Say how long it took to handel an email
*Assign billable time
*Create Service level Agreements
*Look at about 15 different built in reports
*use the knowledge base build in.
*Teach it's fuzzy logic engine that looks up knowledge base articales based on the content of the email.
*Setup Mutliple groups which can't see each others tickets based.
*Add custom feilds

So far I've been very impressed with it.

Try Cerberus Helpdesk.

Last year we did some research and looked into the various different helpdesk solutions that are available. Most of them were really expensive but we found Cerberus for $100. Although it is a ticketing system, it's also got a built in knowledgebase which is searchable on subject, keyword, content, etc. It may not be right for what you need (you don't say why you are implementing a knowledgebase) but it's very handy to have the answers to technical queries available in the same system that the helpdesk uses to record problem.

We use Cerberus and it's great. You can get site licenses for as little as $99 and you get access to a CVS repo for both the parser and the web front end. It's slick and easy to use; you can correspond via email or via the cerberus website.