Slashdot Mirror

LOTS of chatter about Open Source Help Desk Software - Been that route...you get what you pay for. b u t if that's the route you want to take: For the meager price of 0 dollars, you too can enjoy dicey "community" OS software support (if you are having troubles with tech support FOR YOUR TECH SUPPORT SOFTWARE...watch out!), out-dated clunky UIs, and limited functionality and trend / bottle-neck reporting! Super! Sign me up for two! ;) Bone up with some cash (you'll see it back 10 fold in mere months) and buy non-community support, professional looking help desk software! Your customer-facing tech support portal and abilities to streamline and create efficiencies in customer support are more paramount than EVER in this economic climate. Go get you some Web Help Desk http://www.webhelpdesk.com/ or the like. We could be happier. We have LIVE, state-side software support ppl to talk to when we have questions and we got a 40% non-profit discount! In summary, the stove is hot, I've touched it, I'm telling you that it's hot, and you don't have to burn yourself to learn that it is hot. (take heed on the OS help desk software solutions. OS has it's place and god bless the ppl who dev it up but this is not the area to use it...this is CUSTOMER-FACING TECHNOLOGY...you better do it right!) 2cents (hope it helps) Cheers, T

This is not informative in the context of this conversation, because FOSS for multiple (100) seats was specified.

Sorry but I have no idea what you are speaking to??? WHD http://www.webhelpdesk.com/ is one of the most scalable solutions we could find. A colleague of mine using Web Help Desk works at a university and they have ~600 support staff members supporting 30,000+ students and staff with Web Help Desk (their volume is probably near Nocts's craziness). ...and then I have a buddy working start-up (say a little prayer for him in this economy please) who supports the whole gig with just one person. Sorry, I may be missing the forrest for the trees on your comment about this not being applicable. :-\ Web Help Desk is the best help desk software on the market right now, IMHO. :)

You need a self-help knowledge base, me thinks. We use the Web Help Desk Software PRO Edition, which includes Knowledge Base Software. Here is a blurb from their website on it: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/feature-detailed-checklist.html#Knowledge_Base_Management_FAQs We try to *promote* our endusers to go to the "customer service web portal" to enter service tickets. The beauty is that Web Help Desk "suggests FAQs" as they are selecting the category of the service ticket. You definitely need a way to head them off in the past!!! Crazy! Hope this helps. :)

Hands down it has to be the Web Help Desk Software: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/ We needed a customer web portal, an faq knowledge base for self-help (to get them off our backs), customizable ticket form submission with custom fields and customizable ticket categories, email-to-ticket conversion, auto-ticket routing to our techs based on skill-set, customer satisfaction surveys, escalations, reporting, service level agreements with alerts, track time spent on tickets (and report on them), and most importantly, it had to look professional, as it is forward facing to our customers ...and not look like we brewed it up in a day. (we also wanted to run it on a mac os x server, and it does! Win and Linux installers too; don't let the mac bit scare most of you ;) We got it all with WHD! Couldn't be happier. We looked at their Free Edition but it is only for one support agent. The Lite Edition may fit your needs, but we need to track computer and software assets, which was not avail in the Lite Edition. They have stellar support and the UI looks totally "enterprise" and less "spreadsheet-like" vs. most of the open source and php digs out there. Again, couldn't be happier! Worth a peak! :) T

http://webhelpdesk.com/

We've had it for just over a year, done 12,000 tickets, entered inventory for 150 sites and are pretty happy with it. It's not open source, but it is multi platform coming with easy installers for Win, Mac OS, Solaris and Linux. I've run it on Mac to trial and currently Win in production.

The programming language is mostly irrelevant. WebObjects uses Java simply because that's better known by programmers. What WebObjects brings to the table is exactly what OS X does - ridiculously complete and versatile object frameworks. Who cares what code glues together these objects? It's the richness of the framekworks that matters. Anybody who does J2EE or .Net should really look into it. Every application we have reviewed lately that was built on WebObjects works great. We even bought one of them.

IIRC, the USPS uses WebObjects for a number of systems. I sure love their new "automated postal systems."

How small is your company? If you can afford it, Web Help Desk fits the bill. The client list is huge, and includes Apple, Filemaker, Inc., an many government and educational institutions. The software is based on Mac OS X Server (thus Apple's buy-in, I think), and you have several options for the database backend (including MySQL).

How small is your company? If you can afford it, Web Help Desk fits the bill. The client list is huge, and includes Apple, Filemaker, Inc., an many government and educational institutions. The software is based on Mac OS X Server (thus Apple's buy-in, I think), and you have several options for the database backend (including MySQL).