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Ticket Tracking and Customer Management?
An anonymous reader writes "Like many Slashdot readers, I'm sure, I run a small side business doing IT consulting in addition to my day job. I'm looking for a good open-source ticket tracking system that I can run under Linux, preferably one that also has some customer management features. I'd like to be able to maintain a separate record for each job, along with time tracking, work logs, and information about the customer. Much of what I see on Sourceforge is, as usual, pre-pre-pre-alpha with no actual code. Does anyone have any suggestions for a project that might fit my needs?"
A bit of shameless self promotion (since I am the lead developer), check out Eventum.
It might not be the perfect fit for you, but it is stable and customizable. Right now it is lacking built in customer management features, instead it relies on a Customer API to integrate with other systems. Right now I am working on integration with Sugar CRM but do not yet have an ETA on when it will be released.
JIRA is nice, but I'm not sure it satisfies the poster's open source requirements. AFAIK, the source code is only available to 'commercial users' http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v2.6.1 /building.html which I assume requires a paid-for commercial licence http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp . I guess it depends on one's definition of 'open source' as to whether this is sufficiently open.
Postgresql. You may need to do some minor work customizing it....
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
This question has come up before, and I usually answer the same way. RT: Request Tracker is a good place to start. It is a Perl+Apache+MySQL based open source solution. The first few times you install it can be tricky. Find a good and current how-to.
I have since moved away from RT and now use an in-house designed system. But I still give it two thumbs up.
I implemented trac at my workplace as a change control and task management system. We use it for both internal projects as well as billable work, with a number of custom fields for supporting our quoting system and quality control. The built-in Wiki also doubles as our IT documentation repository, all in one easy to access location.
It is extremely extensible, and anything not readily available can be easily created. It didn't take much time to learn the class and data structures and I've modified existing plugins and written a few of my own to support our needs.
JIRA runs under Linux. It is not open source, but the cost of the application and support is well worth it. I believe it is free to use for open source projects. They also provide the full source code, which has allowed us to heavily customize the application. When I started evaluating issue tracking systems this page proved to be rather useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ticket- tracking_systems.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
RT does not scale well at all however. We have had to make major modifications to the source in order to support 200,000+ tickets.
When researching a ticket tracking system to implement at my workplace I came with no experience in any non-proprietary system. I compared RT and trac side-by-side and found trac to be much more readable and user-friendly. Even for me, when setting it up, I spent an entire day trying to make heads or tails of the RT interface, while in a day I already had trac up and running and I was showing others how to log in and use it. Now that it is in production, what surprises me the most is the ease with which the non-IT department managers use it for tracking their tickets and project progress.
The irony of the situation is that I do specialize in Perl, which is why I went toward RT first. I assumed it would have been the better choice for making any changes to the underlying system, but in the process of working with trac I've learned Python enough to hack together a number of custom solutions for our needs.
Since I didn't go any further with RT after that first day, I can't say how well that would have worked, but in my case RT did leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Check out Vtiger, it's a really nice CRM and also has ticketing features.
The website is down (slashdotted?) Do you know where I can submit a ticket?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
wow .. all he found was "pre pre pre alpha alpha alpha"
.. RT Open source , even has commercial support if you want.Ive been using RT in many forms for at least 10 years now. I remember it back in the late 90s.
.. remedy is another that pops into my mind.
t racking_systems
the author did not do a very hard search.
First and for most
And then of course there is JIRA. This may be more for dev work. Most places ive been used RT for anything that MIGHT face the customer and the areas that had 'issues' and 'projects' that would end up closing at some time. But JIRA was used by the devs for bug tracking and coding projects.
of course there are a lot of others
Seriously though. How could you have enough experience and knowledge to run your 'side business' and never have run into either of these projects in your travels. Where have you really worked that they have not used a ticketing system ? Or perhaps you are fresh out of school. But even fresh out of school. I would think that even the dorm network operators would have used SOME sort of ticketing system that you would have been exposed to , if even from the 'customer' side.
If your google-fu is so weak as to have not found these , then I fear for your customers.
there is even a nice wiki page comparing all the products..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_
RoundUp (which is Python based) is a great system..
Its self contained.. a GREAT email interface.. easy to setup and easy to extend.
RT used to be much more difficult to install than it is now. Even then, it wasn't very difficult if you are a Linux Administrator with a knowledge of perl.
Now, it's extraordinarily simple. Initial understanding of some of the rights management will take a little bit of time depending on how complex you want it to be.
http://use.perl.org
yarbel,
I'd love to hear a bit more about the scaling problems you had over on rt-devel@lists.bestpractical.com. We have end users (some of them paying customers, but plenty of them not) with well over a million tickets in their RT instances without any sort of performance problem.
And I'd certainly love to see patches for anything you had to do to get performance up to snuff. (Since, well, we'd certainly like to improve things if users are running into trouble.
Best,
Jesse (RT's chief catherder)
This is more for internal issue tracking and software development issue tracking. At least this is the way I have seen it used.
If you want to use something for external facing issue tracking and make it customer facing straight away I would suggest RT by Best Practical. It is GPL and relatively open as far as brain effort to extend it is concerned. It is also trivial to use for issue oriented CRM/sales which is typical of a service company or consultancy.
It is used as the primary system for tracking customer facing issues by companies with turnover in the billions like NTT/Verio. It is also used by small non-IT companies like my favourite plumbing supply shop http://www.plumbworld.co.uk/. It is also often adapted to integrate the support, CRM and sales process like in Claranet http://www.claranet.co.uk/. Judging by the people on its mailing list it is also running in pilots and internal projects at Audi, BT and a couple of other places.
It has been in stable for nearly 4-5 years now. I have used in my previous job, and while it is not completely free of bugs, it is possibly the best general purpose issue tracking system I have seen so far.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Whoever tagged this post as "doyourownwork" is an asshole who has no understanding of the way The Internet and it's online communities work. For any question that gets posted on Slashdot, there are dozens if not hundreds of Slashdot readers who want to know the answer. I wouldn't be surprised if 20% of the Slashdot community is running some kind of business that might have a need for a ticket tracking and CRM software setup. Many Slashdot readers are also very friendly, so while a person could easily spend hours researching a question like this, it's far more effective to come to Slashdot and benefit from the experience of it's users.
So to all the douchebags who criticize people who ask questions on Slashdot: FUCK YOU.