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Open Source Help-Desk Software?
ASyndicate asks: "I am starting a consulting business. I am looking for a good Open Source program that implements a web-based help-desk system. What kinds of projects and programs would the Slashdot community recommend? What I need is a set of pages that will allow a client to check the status of his/her work order on the machine(s). The only projects I found were ones on sourceforge that did not have any files released. Only one did and It was no where near operational." There was a similar question back in 1999, and there were a small number of informative responses to the query. Has the intervening time improved the options at all?
I have a version of one called Teacup that I have been making some significant modifications to. Teacup by itself supports email and web based submission, and web based tracking of tickets. It supports 4 user defined fields which really come in handy. The changes I've made to it are as follows: 1) email replies that include a PR # get added to the log file for the PR in question. 2) Tickets are sorted by priority. Urgent tickets are highlighted. 3) Uses only 1 .cgi for both users & admins and therefore can be used in an authenticated (intranet) type environment. (Teacup normally uses teacup.cgi for users and teacup-secure.cgi for admins and expects admins to be the only users with $ENV{REMOTE_USER} set.)
4) I wrote a small script that sync's an LDAP directory with the users in Teacup so you don't have to add all the requestors yourself. Just add them to your LDAP and they appear in Teacup.
If anyone is interested in my version of Teacup email me at wayhigh@NOSPAMsantacruz.org and ask for it. I haven't given it out at this point but it really is becoming very usable so I may as well.. can't offer any further support on it.. it's written in perl so it should be easy for most people to pick up and run with.
Here are two systems I found in less than five minutes:
The Open Directory is also a good source of information - the have a whole page of Help Desk programs (though not all are OSS).
We recently deployed RT (www.fsck.com/projects/rt/). It is a compact system with email, web, and command line interfaces. The stable version (1.x) does not allow the requestors to check the status via the web, but v2 (which is now at beta 2) does. If you check the status page of the web site you can get into a server running v2 to check it out. We have fallen in love with it and it is chugging happily away on a P120. It is implemented using mod_perl and mySQL, it took all of 5 minutes to get up and running. Cheers.
Check FireFly from Open Care. We are actively interested in it at Open Country. It's nicely done and under active development. If you want to chekc it out, log in and try the demo at http://firefly.ocare.com/
It's on SourceForge, and is the first hit on Google, so I'm not sure how you missed it.
You could have also checked out the Help Desk category at DMOZ for which I am an editor. There are several open or free help desk packages listed.
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A help desk is something that, I find, is different for everyone. Some Help Desks ACTUALLY help, while others just take work orders. For ones that actually help, one that would have the ability to search prior work orders and see if the same thing came up before, and if there's instructions, then tell the user how to fix it themselves. This helps the user LEARN something saving your HD people another phone call. This is the best kind of help desk and one which should be a/the model. If this is just going to be something that people are going to hit a web page and type in what's wrong, then you could also just look for a web based work order system as well as other help desk type software. Help Desk's are highly different from company to company and some times, you just have to devlop your own software to make it do what you want.
Gorkman
Grammar Nazi? Are you feeling alright? Surely you meant "hear" instead of "here"?
Dear Lord, Grammar Nazi getting his homonyms mixed up! What in the world is happening?
Check out this recent submission I made. I was looking for help-desk software with the ability for our department to track our work through workorders. While we have not implemented it full-time yet, we will most likely go with DCL at our campus. It may do most of what you are looking for, is pretty configurable, and is continually being developed. I believe you can give customers accounts so they can see progress of their work. Might not be exactly what you are looking for, but I recommend you have a look and see what it'll do.
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
Did I just here you whisper that from outside my house window?
Keeping
Check out Freshmeat for what you seek. A search on 'help desk' brings up a page full of options, of which about 5 or so are what you seek. Of those 5, 3 of them version 1.0 or greater, so I think that they may be stable/robust enough for you to use. Ben
Keeping
Unfortunately, the stupidity will continue.
Is it too much to ask that y'all stop being assholes by default?
"I am a warrior, and information is my weapon..."
There's a very good reference on Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux at http://linas.org/linux/pm.html. It has helpful comments, too.
I disagree. If it had been hardware, then it would be easy, I agree. You just go to the local hardware store, and ask for the nails or rope or whatever.
But I've never even seen a software store in my town, or the next one.
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(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)