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?

Comments

look at RT

[ckolar]

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.

Let me say this.....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Before someone busts on someone for not looking or doing research before asking this, let me tell you this. This person wants to know from someone who may have experience using a open source Help Desk solution. He doesn't want to know there are X amount of products on freshmeat and X are 1.0 or above. He WANTS to know what are the pitfalls and good things about the software. Does it require alot of maintenance? Does it fail every 5 minutes? That kind of stuff. That said, from actually using a Help Desk product(non opensource), and from having worked a help desk kind of deal, I think I know what would work.

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.

I asked a similar question recently

[kchayer]

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