Software for Technical Support Tracking?

Wehesheit asks: "I work at a large department store which sells computers. As the *sole* technician I have to handle all the customer techwork (virus scanning, spyware, upgrades etc..), and for the most part I get along just fine but recently my co-workers have expressed a difficulty in 'knowing whats going on' in the techroom. I am wondering if the Slashdot community knows of any software which will enable me to track work I am doing for each customer and allow myself, and other employees, to pull it up easily while add notes such as 'bob called and said put in 512mb RAM'. Currently we use sticky notes which I'm sure everyone can imagine is not very trackable or reliable. Having incident numbers I can print off and put on machines would be excellent, so if a machine is marked done in the software my co-workers can match the number, print off the worknotes and give the customer the machine. Also, I have to be able to do this for $0 which means freeware. Any ideas?"

Comments

Request Tracker

[KagatoLNX]

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

Look at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/.

Re:Request Tracker

[babbage]

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)