Best FOSS Help Desk Software For Small Firms?

Nocts writes "I'm currently working for a moderately sized company that manages a large portion of its internal help desk questions through a Jabber-based chat room. What we're looking for instead is an open source, preferably Web-based solution that will give us the ability to have floor representatives queue questions and concerns in a similar fashion to BugTraq, directed at the help desk. Email capability would be preferred for elaboration of specific issues, but the more we can centralize everything into the queued system the better. Any recommendations and experiences? Just about any language is doable since I have the ability to configure and upgrade our servers and we're looking at about a user base of 100 people, with around 5-10 questions a minute."

Comments

100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[bakuun]

That's one helpdesk question per user every 10-20 minutes.. my god.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Does he work at Retards R Us or something?

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Bryansix]

No, but I do work at Retard's R US and I do want an answer. Now pony up!

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably means he has 100 people running the help desk not 100 people using the end product.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Gorobei]

We handle that traffic level with a few simple many-to-many chatrooms. All askers and answerers can see all messages, with highlighting of messages aimed at them. Bad answers are corrected quickly, and stupid questioners tend to get told to STFU: you quickly learn who is competent and who is not to be trusted. New users get up to speed quickly because they can watch the text stream and learn the expected style of communication.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like irc.freenode.net without waiting hours for an answer

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks you should rework IT. That's ludicrous. Try educating the user.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[DoofusOfDeath]

That's one helpdesk question per user every 10-20 minutes.. my god.

They should be proud. That's actually kind of low for a Microsoft shop.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[bsd_usr]

Me too!!

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

That still doesn't sound right. The title says it is for a "small firm". To me, anything under 100 is small. If that's just 100 help-desk staff, I'd expect a corporate base of at least 3000. (1:30 help-desk ratio assumption). That's a far cry from what I'd call "small".

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes more sense, but they wouldn't be a small firm with a support staff like that...right?

I AM the help desk at a firm with ~120 employees. We have a nice little custom asp.net tracking system that works pretty well, although people only file stuff in it maybe twice a week on average...
We are small enough that a simple phone call or personal email is all that is required for most issues.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Nocts]

As the submitter, I should have elaborated in the main article so my apologies. We have ~100 users asking questions to helpdesk with an average of 5-10 questions a minute from those same users and it is being fielded by 2-3 actual helpdesk representatives at any given time. That's a silly number for representatives to require answers for what are generally common-sense responses, I agree. While we streamline our helpdesk ticket process we will also be reviewing our training procedures to eliminate the questions that these people should be able to answer themselves. While we could also just hire additional Helpdesk staff, it doesn't change the fact that Jabber is a terrible way to manage floor-level questions, especially when documentation is concerned.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[smittyoneeach]

You really don't know where all that government money goes, do you?

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[mraiser]

OK, seriously. 10 questions per minute is 600 questions per hour. 3 people would have to answer each question in 20 seconds or less just to keep up. What kind of a horrible system requires every user to submit a help desk request three times an hour?!?! Do you by any chance mean 5 to 10 currently pending questions in any given minute? Given multi-minute response times, this seems at least feasible given the size of the user base.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Nocts]

3 people would have to answer each question in 20 seconds or less just to keep up

Correct. Since the questions are from our floor reps and not the clients the actual inquires can be something as simple as "Is x property out?" with a simple yes/no answer. And the system is generally in place for questions that the reps can not answer on their own. Our larger problem is the retraining of procedure and encouraging the RTFM method, but it doesn't change the fact that we needed a more elegant solution for documenting the escalated helpdesk issues.

And yes, sometimes the questions would be queued in the chat room with the simple questions answered in priority.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Pjerky]

Why don't you just setup a simple forum that people can submit to and anyone can answer. Then your moderators can not only answer for one person but other users can see the answers to their same questions. Thus reducing the number of questions.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[jon3k]

Since when is 100 helpdesk techs "small"? I must work inside a fucking amoeba...

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Steauengeglase]

Ah yes, the good old zero-n/zero-FF user operator error.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[ozmanjusri]

I must work inside a fucking amoeba.

Until the next exocytosis, anyway.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

So each and everyone of your helpdesk people answers 3 to 5 questions per minute, every minute? Sounds fun...

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[gbjbaanb]

usually the problem with forums depends on the kind of user you have.
If you have technical/interested users, they will spend all day surfing the forums, asking and answering questions (hmmm.... like I am doing right now).

'ordinary' users will just want to know the answer, will not bother to search the forum, and will ask the same old questions over and over.

In the latter case, a 'knowledgebase' type list of common answers is a better option - and if they ask a question that is on that simple-to-view list, you just send them the link.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Bert64]

Perhaps his small firm provides helpdesk services to other firms?

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[richlv]

it sounds like you are currently solving many problems with single tool. at least attempting to.
i would suggest spreading it out.
for simple questions, leave jabber nad implement forum. make it so that helpdesk personnel rarely answers on jabber (peer help), and somewhat answers on forums. maybe even give moderator rights to some sane user, if you can find one. phpbb might work for that.

create a location that could collect these answers from jabber and forum in a way _users_ can easily find and understand that - i'd choose wiki (mediawiki), because users could eventually fix a problem here or there that documentation author would never notice.

now, when simple problems are covered by the above solutions, a proper tracker might be useful to handle and, well, track, more serious problems - or anything that takes more time to do.
having used quite many of those systems, i'd personally prefer bugzilla. while it is said to be primarily a bug tracking system, it would still do better at general purpose helpdesk software than many that are marketed as such.

now, what i'd suggest staying away from - computer associates unicenter/servicedesk solution ;> - though i hope you would have no considered it anyway.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, RT ("Request Tracker") works well for 100-1000 users.

According to the site:

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

The RT platform has been under development since 1996, and is used by systems administrators, customer support staffs, IT managers, developers and marketing departments at thousands of sites around the world.

Written in object-oriented Perl, RT is a high-level, portable, platform independent system that eases collaboration within organizations and makes it easy for them to take care of their customers.

RT manages key tasks such as the identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification required by enterprise-critical applications including project management, help desk, NOC ticketing, CRM and software development.

RT is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organizations worldwide.

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[tiananmen tank man]

K.I.S.S, How about nntpd

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[chargrilled]

Take a look at spiceworks. It's not open source but it is free. We use it with 3 techs and ~180 users. Works well for us.

http://www.spiceworks.com/

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Petaris]

I just installed RT a couple weeks ago and I am really liking it. From others I have talked to it scales well. I am a one man IT shop and it allows for web interface and email (I have been using strictly email for the user's side). It even has an RTFM (RT FAQ Manager) component. ;)

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

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[S-4'N3]

Eww... while reading the comments, I saw that you said you'd installed RT and I just about threw up in my mouth. Please do yourself a favour, and if you use RT, please make sure you have the latest version, and/or can tart up the interface to make it more pleasing to look at. Now let me please excuse that autonomic reaction and say it's based solely on personal experience using an ugly and disorganized implementation of RT. Secondly, while it might actually be very practical and useful as a ticketing system, a ticketing system isn't necessarily the direction timothy would want to go in. A operation ticketing system can be very useful (essential) for managing tasks, duties, escalations, follow ups, etc, but as far as documentation or communication is concerned, they don't tend to be structured in a way that gives the immediate response of a chat room. I agree with several previous posters in that perhaps a better approach would be to improve training procedures and documentation so that agents have access to the information they need rather than relying on a chat typed interface. I personally recommend mediawiki, as pretty much everybody on the planet knows how to use it, you'd want to have a more monitored or secure editing process.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Petaris]

I'm using the latest version (3.8.2) and the interface is quite decent I think. The OP asked about helpdesk software recommendations so I gave one. I agree that perhaps the users could use more training but he didn't ask about that and I'm sure that.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[no1home]

Previously, we used a product called Heat. Now we use Footprints. Footprints is very good and quite flexible, but it isn't FOSS. In looking for FOSS helpdesk software, I ran across Spiceworks and have tested it out. I can't say that I like it. It's pretty slow and not very intuitive. And it's main screens have a lot of advertising (I know, they need money from somewhere). I like the idea of using discovery to populate the hardware database, but it's also very slow and still requires quite a bit of cleanup work. I've yet to find a decent utility to import my existing data (though I stopped looking a while ago). I'd be much happier if I could find something that is FOSS, looks and feels like Footprints, and has features of both, Footprints and Spiceworks.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Just Some Guy]

K.I.S.S, How about nntpd

I'll be darned - just when you think you've seen everything.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[kchrist]

In what way is setting up and maintaining an NNTP daemon and teaching people to use a newsreader more simple than installing a web-based forum?

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[SpikeT]

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. :)

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[davidbrit2]

Holy flippin' crap. The company I work for has around 140 employees, with about half a dozen locations (a couple are even in different states). Our IS department consists of 4 people, including myself. Our rate of help requests is several orders of magnitude smaller than what you're describing.

There is something seriously out of whack, and I don't think it's the help desk software. I strongly recommend you and your cohorts read Joel Spolsky's Seven steps to remarkable customer service. Step 1 is of particular relevance here, but there's no reason not to read the other six steps too. You have to look at not just "How do I solve this user's problem?", but also consider "How do I either prevent this problem from happening in the future, or at least lessen the user's reliance on the help desk in solving it?"

Users are inherently lazy. This is not some anti-social commentary on the sad state of society, it's the simple truth. We prefer to find the easiest way to get something accomplished, and if you make it easier for them to ask you for some data, or how to do something in your ERP software, as opposed to running a report on your intranet site, or reading a manual or FAQ, then that is exactly what they will do, and you won't be able to get anything done besides act as a natural-language front end to your information systems.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[BitZtream]

Something is wrong in your organization if you are getting that many questions.

100 users/5-10 questions per minute == 1 questions per user, every 10-20 minutes. That indicates a fundamental flaw in your organization.

Your organization can not possibly be functional with that rate of questions.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[fataugie]

Right, but the key I think is...what is their retention level? Good God, how many questions can anyone have? Do they not remember from one day to the next how to do something? Or do they think their exact same question as one of the other 99 users is going to get a different answer?

How about a FAQ to help reduce the redundant questions.

I think I'd go "Postal" (TM) if I had that many questions coming in from such a small user group day in and day out.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[BitZtream]

Let me add to that, I took a quick look at one of our support queues. This queue serves one of our product, which has approximately 15k users (Software as a service users). This queue not only sees the users questions, but also all sorts of other customer support issues related to the service such as user administratation when the customer doesn't want to manager their own, or any custom work they need done to the product, basically almost all of the customer related inquires that come after the customer is paying, the pre-sale related stuff goes to a different queue.

The queue has roughly 30k tickets in it, and is 4 years old. If you figure 260 work days a year (52weeks*5 days), 8 hour work days (which isn't fair as the tickets come in from the users at all hours, since its a global product and people all tend to work at random hours anyway.). That equates to almost 29 tickets a day, or 3.6 an hour, or 0.06 per minute.

So your 100 users are asking about 83 times more questions per minute than my 15k users. Or more accurately, your users are asking approximately 1400 times the number of questions that any one of my users is.

Now let me also add that we're extremely concerned with the amount of time we spend answering our users questions because we get too many as is! We're in the planning stages of several new support features, revamp'd FAQs and documentation and such to deal with the volume we get now.

Without knowing your product I can't tell you what to do there, but if ANY of our products or services had even one tenth the rate you do, we'd likely abandon the product or at least it would be refactored pretty damn quickly.

Unless your users are customers which are buying the answers from you, then you need to fix the problem elsewhere, no trouble ticket/issue tracking system is going to fix your problem.

Likewise your limited number of help desk personal are going to have a difficult time keeping up with this sort of question rate as soon as you have any sort of real questions roll in that take some time to research and answer.

I typically hate how slashdotters will say 'thats not your problem, you need to do XXX instead', but this really is one of those cases where you are just so far off into la la land that theres no point in suggesting a ticket system for you, There isn't a ticket system that can fix your problem directly.

Now, if you use this ticket system to start logging and tracking how ridiculous your users are, then I can see it as a solution to the problem, but just using it to help your helpdesk people keep things in line is a lost cause, you're going to spend far too much money on your internal help desk if your rate of questions per user doesn't drop by a couple orders of magnitude at least.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[spxero]

Have you thought about something like SpiceWorks? It's Windows-only (last time I checked), but it has excellent capabilities to e-mail the helpdesk, but above where they enter a request is where you can put notes about currently down systems, or links to a FAQ for answers to common questions and such. It was a really slick install the last time I looked at it, and I can only imagine it getting better.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[xenocide2]

We use HEAT at my place of employment, and I can't figure out why. It's a total dog; most of our queries come from email, but the most it can do is write poorly threaded notices about tickets. The best case I've seen is adding "journal" entries cataloging communication with the customer. Plus the whole UI is very 1995, or designed from in Access or something.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[lgarner]

Just maybe, not everyone in the "user base" is a tech?

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[NateTech]

Ditto. RT works great.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

~100 users asking questions
5-10 questions a minute
2-3 actual helpdesk

there is something wrong with your documentation and/or training

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and stupid questioners tend to get told to STFU.

If you're telling any users to stfu, then I can see why your caseload is so high.

Sounds like you need to institute a quick tutorial for whatever software you're trying to support.

Servicedesk+

[MyrddinBach]

Try Servicedesk Plus from Adventnet. They have a free version you can use. http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/service-desk/index.html

Re:Servicedesk+

[George Beech]

I second this, We have two instances, one for Ops and one for Development. Especially with the new release it is a decent product for Small to medium sized shops. The free version only lets you have one tech though, but it's a cheap product to buy between 1k and 5k/year depending on which version you buy and how many techs you need.

Re:Servicedesk+

[joelmax]

I use this myself, and while it is a good solution, the free version is limited to 1 tech (Admin login at that). After that you have to buy a license to get more techs and it gets expensive quickly.

Where I actually work, we use a different issue tracking system (Not nearly as comprehensive as service desk plus), but it is free and gets the job done quite nicely. It is called Tech Center (Or Web + Center Version 5.0) and it has the basic/critical features for issue tracking, just not the bells and whistles like live chat and such

RT

[dg41]

What about RT? http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Re:RT

[DarkVillain]

We used to use RT, and mainly ditched it because it was rather slow. It may have improved since then, as this was about 3 or 4 years ago that we moved to a different product that has a low license cost. I've been thinking about giving RT another try, just to see if they've made any improvements.

Re:RT

[jgaynor]

RT doesn't scale well. We used it at Rutgers but around the 100K ticket mark it started to tank. So we rewrote it:

http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/

Very capable.

Re:RT

[Anonymous Coward]

I've taken a look at this and I wasn't impressed by it. We're using a much more robust solution called JIRA. Aside from ticketing, it is great for change management! ;)

Re:RT

[certain death]

I can't find the +5 BadAss button! I love FOSS, the whole "So we rewrote it" made me nearly orgasm!!!!!

Re:RT

[red_dragon]

We're using a much more robust solution called JIRA.

Automatic JIRA or Manual JIRA?

Re:RT

[TuaAmin13]

We used an older version of RT, but recently updated to RT3. We've found a few minor bugs that we were able to fix (yay open source!), but other than that it's been treating us well.

We get a rather low volume though (about 4-6 requests per day), as most of our users we see in person.

Re:RT

[Anonymous Coward]

RT doesn't scale well. We used it at Rutgers but around the 100K ticket mark it started to tank. So we rewrote it:

http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/

Very capable.

Any chance that some of the changes can be ported back to RT?

Re:RT

[ToddChapman]

RT Rocks. Great software, great community, lots of good extensions available. Our company is a heavy user of RT. We have one instance for external requests and one for internal requests. It was really easy to customize for our exact needs. Note: I wrote Asset Tracker, an asset tracking (duh) extension to RT. http://code.google.com/p/asset-tracker-4rt/

Re:RT

[citizenr]

last time I used Jira you couldnt even mark dupes

Re:RT

[LinuxOnEveryDesktop]

We're at almost 200K tickets. RT scales fine, you just have to tune it a bit. And run it on PostgreSQL, and *definitely* tweak your PostgreSQL for performance.

In older versions, many indexes were missing by default. That may have been fixed more recently. Also, PostgreSQL 8.3 made a huge difference for us performance wise.

Re:RT

[jesse]

Readers might want to take my comments with a grain of salt, as I'm RT's original author and chief architect. I routinely work with clients with RT instances that are well over 100,000 tickets. When using any large application at scale, you're going to need to invest time in performance tuning, but 100k tickets isn't "big" for an RT instance. With a single front end box and a single backend (untuned, but beefy) DB server, I've seen an RT server doing 10,000 tickets on a slow day, bursting to 25,000 with several million in the database.

Re:RT

[Rob Riggs]

We use RT at my company. It's been in use for over three years. We're at the 150K ticket mark at this point with 300+ users. We use it for production processes, production support, CIT/helpdesk, systems admin, software development process and more. We use it a ton. The complaint that it slows down with a large number of tickets is a valid one. We also have a ton of ticket queues and a very busy home page which makes it even slower. But we're pushing something like 60K tickets a year right now so it's not slowing us down too much.

One thing that helped was to have it start feeding a Google Search Appliance with content on every update. Now we use the power of Google to index & search the content, which makes searching through tickets much more bearable.

Re:RT

[ribo-bailey]

I used RT at the last place I was a UNIX admin. It's not a terrible system, but writing extensions in perl/mason was not a simple task, do to what should have been simple reporting metrics.

Re:RT

[Anonymous Coward]

My company uses RT as well and it is generally good but the search features suck and there doesn't seem to be a dirt-simple way to view old tickets, or show all tickets you yourself submitted.

I never really spent more than 15sec looking for an answer but I would expect it to be really simple to do.

Re:RT

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish. RT scales fine.

I'm running an RT instance (3.2) with over 3 million tickets. processing approx 2k tickets a day. System is being accessed by approx 30-50 staff. Runs on an Oracle backend database and has 2 frontend web servers.

Re:RT

[trawg]

We use RT at our work at the moment for both development/bug tracking and also user support. We had a LOT of teething problems and invested (imo) far too much time in trying to making it work properly - lots of odd performance issues, regular 10sec + load times, all sorts of weirdness. We spent a lot of time tweaking and finally got it running nicely (note: we're webdevs working on high utilisation sites so we know what we're doing as well, or at least think we do).

Aside from all the messing around - I don't like it for user support. We're doing maybe between 600-1000 inquiries a month - I can't imagine doing it at the sort of volume specified in the OP.

My big woes are the lack of good reporting, so its hard to identify trends - short of putting issues in queues I can't get visibility on what issues are cropping up regularly unless our staff remember them.

Also, there's no option for doing Standard Responses (at least not in the base install), meaning every response needs to be custom-written. There might be an addon or something for this; I haven't looked.

I got /really/ used to this in FogBugz (which I really liked for support purposes, but we got turned off by the price tag and closed-sourceness - we wanted something open so we could extend it. We've made a few changes to RT although have found hacking on it to be a pain in the ass (largely due to our inexperience with perl/mason/etc.

We also rolled our own and use that, which works much better for our purposes, as it is heavily customised for our specific uses.

All that said, I'd encourage you to try RT and see if it meets your needs. It's not terrible by any means, it just doesn't do what I want as well as I'd like.

Re:RT

[theillien]

It's still slow but otherwise quite usable (not as slow as it used to be). Highly customizable and extensible, too. While it isn't the most polished app out there, it has a strong user base with various options for support including community and paid. There are many recommendations I could offer such as not uploading binary files and optimizing the database on a regular basis.

Re:RT

[Anonymous Coward]

For how long, how many queues, how many users, and what version? That's over 3.5 million tickets a year assuming all days are slow days.

Re:RT

[noldrin]

My company used to use RT. I could work the ticket system from Opera Mini on my Symbian based phone. My company moved to a closed source solution called Connectwise because it integrated the entire customer database into the ticket system. Although now we have trouble using even from windows mobile phones.

Re:RT

[FlyingGuy]

Yeah but you wrote in PERL a reporting language that was bastardized into something pretending to be an OOP language. Thanks but no thanks.

Re:RT

[ToddChapman]

There is an official RT extension for doing "standard responses." It's called RTFM. (RT Faq Manager) http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/. Our customer support loves it.

Re:RT

[mkosmo]

Have you ever developed anything with Perl? (Its not "PERL"!!!) It is an elegant language. You just have to be mature with it just as with any other language so you don't get ahead of yourself and stuck with the stereotype Perl maintenance beast. Please remember that Java is not a suitable language for most things (I assume you're a fresh Java developer from your ignorance).

Re:RT

[Longstaff]

Don't take this the wrong way, because I love RT, but it does have some serious performance problems in the large scale.

It's absolutely perfect for the volume that I'm currently administering (3K-4K tickets per year, roughly 15K correspondence, 70K transactions) and once you realize why certain things are laid out the way they are, the API is *very* easy to extend and customize.

The last RT shop that I worked in was a completely different story. We were doing 100K+ tickets per year easy (with that increasing at a rapid rate) and that was 6 years ago. When I left, about a year and a half ago, there were approx 700+ queues, many thousands upon thousands of users and millions of correspondence. There was quite a bit of performance tweaking we needed to do to the code and, of course, the DB just to make it useable. Simply iterating over the queue list using the API was taking upwards of 3 seconds. 3 seconds. Not to render the list in a browser. Not to access the names of each queue. Just to iterate through the list. That install is now plowing through tickets faster than even and is well past the 1M ticket mark, likely has in the tens of millions of correspondence and is performing adequately.

RT is a *great* tool, but you're not going to see performance at those numbers unless you have a firm grasp on DB tuning, perl, Mason and RT's architecture and get your hands very dirty - or you pay a hefty sum to Best Practical for support.

Re:RT

[Zoko Siman]

I agree with request tracker. If you are a professional at what you do and take your job seriously you won't have problems with RT performance. Configuring and tuning your RT instance will be crucial.

Re:RT

[FlyingGuy]

Your assumption is faulty as is your conclusion and your logic.

The simple observation that you took umbrage with my case usage could also point out that you are a grammar queen, but I digress.

While perl may have one or two attributes that could perhaps be (after careful examination and argument between those that care to argue about such things) considered positive, it has been shown time and time again to be used both incorrectly and without do regard or care by those self congratulatory individuals who pride themselves on creating code which after all is said and done is both unmaintainable and there no longer worth the energy it takes to polarize the magnetic realms of a disk drive to save it, much less read it.

So in answer to your questions: No I am not a java programmer, I consider it, much like xml to be an answer to a question that no one asked. I find it like so many of the other "modern" languages to be abysmal in form, function and performance.

Re:RT

[Bazman]

We have a pretty small RT system for managing departmental issues. It used to get very slow, and checking on the server revealed apache spinning like mad, so we'd have to kick apache and it would get going okay again.

I asked our university RT admin guy if he ever had this problem. And he said no, his RT was always pretty slick. Then I saw a lightbulb come on. Ah, he said, I do have a cron job that kicks apache every night at 3am. Why? I asked. Well, he replied, because RT used to get very slow and their apache would spin, was the answer.

So now we kick our apache at 3am every morning and RT hasn't grinded to a halt since.

Re:RT

[TuaAmin13]

We actually looked at your extension while planning the upgrade to RT3.

Rest assured, people are finding your extension.

Re:RT

[Jellybob]

Your DBAs are incompetant then.

Our RT instance is currently at almost 3 million tickets from the last 8 years, and still going strong. Thats running on a single DB server, and a pair of frontend web servers.

It will run a bit slow if you do something silly like a full text search across every queue, but other then that it's fine.

It's also crazily extendable, although we are about hitting it's limits now, after adding support for a lot of internal processes.

Re:RT

[Thundersnatch]

So now we kick our apache at 3am every morning and RT hasn't grinded to a halt since.

Restarting IIS nightly used to be SOP back in the Windows NT4 and Win2000 days, but Microsoft cleaned up their act with IIS6 on Windows 2003, which we have never had to restart* for any of our applications.

It's nice to see that Apache has caught up to Microsoft circa 1996!

*Yes, I know about automatic worker process recycling, but that isn't nearly the same thing as a service restart. And yes, I know these boxes get bounced at least bimonthly for patches. I'm trying to make a joke here.

Re:RT

[mverwijs]

Last update to software in 2005 according to http://ruqueue.rutgers.edu/download/.

That would be a dealbreaker to me.

Re:RT

[Grobbendonk]

last time I used Jira you couldnt even mark dupes

So you haven't used it for 5 years? Give it another go sometime, it's been under heavy development. Still not quite a "Helpdesk" though. And it's not Open Source

Re:RT

[drinkypoo]

While perl may have one or two attributes that could perhaps be (after careful examination and argument between those that care to argue about such things) considered positive, it has been shown time and time again to be used both incorrectly and without do regard or care

Kind of like how millions to billions of people use English every day without due regard or care by those self-congratulatory individuals who pride themselves on creating comments which after all is said and done completely failed to deliver a smackdown.

Here's a hint, "Guy". (Can't help but picture cardboard Saddam when I hear that now.) When you're delivering your complaint about misuse of one fantastically powerful and popular language, don't totally fuck up your delivery in another. HTH, HAND, kthxbye.

Re:RT

[IceCreamGuy]

That's like saying credit cards are useless and stupid because they were originally developed only for food stamps. The Internet is for idiots because it was a government comm network that was bastardized into something that now drives business and culture on a global scale. Herbie Hancock's use of a vocoder in the album Sunlight was dumb because vocoders were originally developed for telephonic encryption. My point is that your point is really dumb.

BackupPC is in Perl. Nagios plugins are a snap in Perl. There's a library for everything in Perl. Perl is easy. It's installed in every *nix OS that apparently doesn't reside in your basement. There are O'Reilly books on RT, dude, and you're going to dismiss it because it's written in a language that you can't even logically qualify your distaste for? Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:RT

[Omega996]

yeah, I have IIS 6 and WSUS 3 SP1 on 2k3R2, and have to recycle the worker processes constantly (every 5 minutes or so), or the w3wp.exe processes will redline. To give IIS6 due credit, I don't think the problem is with the w3wp.exe process itself - seems to be some BS with the way the WSUS app communicates with IIS. Every fix from MS issued so far has done nothing for the problem. Ah, well. I do remember the IIS4 days, unfortunately. At the company I worked for, the developers there had some reporting BS that used a Crystal Reports ActiveX and IIS to query a SQL Server 6.5 database that was populated from my 'medium iron' AIX babies running DB/2. Anyway, every morning there would be a loss of communication between the IIS processes and the SQL Server, and then the SQL Server would stop responding. The developers couldn't figure out why, or didn't want to dig too deeply, so they simply had the server admins recycle the box every morning when the last shift went home.

Re:RT

[guruevi]

I don't know about the gp but you can do a graceful reload on Apache and that has been in there since forever (before Microsoft's automatic worker process recycling). It doesn't cause any interruption and if you have your sessions handled correctly, nobody would notice. Next to that, I hate worker processes on IIS. You can't have more than 20 on a box before hitting the end of your memory, threading (what AWP basically is) in Apache is handled much better. Putting each site (I'm talking about 500 sites) in it's own AWP effectively kills the box and the memory and CPU limiting based on per minute samples makes it worse and very difficult for troubleshooting

Re:RT

[jra]

I gather the amusingly named RTFM (Request Tracker FAQ Manager) is the solution for the problem you note, though I'm only just 2 weeks into my latest install of 3.8.2, and haven't gone there yet.

RT's not bad, but there are some spots where I find myself tripping over they way it wants to do things: there are are some environments for which it's much better suited than others.

Specifically, I am now in an 'internal IT' environment; my opinion of RT was that it didn't deal all that well with my previous environment, which was 'external paid consultant' -- it doesn't really do "customer file", and the attendent things like "any email tickets from this email address are for customer Y; automatically add email Z (their supervisor) as a watcher". I would *like* that in my current environment; I *needed* it in the other one, and it just won't do it.

I also need something like Asset Tracker, but again, I need it more tightly integrated than AT is -- the ability to pick the most likely assets about which a user might be reporting a problem is pretty important, and I couldn't see how you'd do it from looking at the available pre-install information, which is sort of thin.

The best suggestion anyone had was to treat customers as assets in AT, but that required a level of training for ticket writers that simply wasn't going to fly.

So yeah, maybe RT will suit you, but as I note in the lead to the (still pretty thin) user manual on the wiki: "Don't install it Sunday if you need to write tickets Monday morning".

It is, in the phrasing of... Brooks?... a program. Not a Systems Program Product.

At least, it isn't for free; what you get if you give money denominated in three zeroes to Best Practical, I can't say.

Re:RT

[jesse]

Longstaff,

3 seconds to iterate over the queue list sounds _broken_. I know you're no longer with that employer, but I'd encourage anybody else running into performance issues like that to bring them up on The rt-users mailinglist. There are plenty of folks who've probably seen and work through whatever it is that you're running into. And I'd much rather get scalability issues aired publicly in an rt-related forum where the community can work together to improve matters than have multiple sysadmins, DBAs and programmers struggle in silence.

Re:RT

[Thundersnatch]

IIS worker processes have nothing to do with threading. Worker processare are just that: separate processes that isolate web applications on the same box from one another, so that one badly-behaved web application doesn't kill all the others running on the same instance of IIS. Each worker process is multi-threaded and has its own connection pooling, etc.

In the apache world, I suppose this would be like having one apache front-end process that listened on port 80/443 and used mod_proxy to relay connections to a bunch of different Apache processes, each in turn running one or more applications on different ports, all on the same server.

Re:RT

[hard_core]

i was going to post the same thing...

and i thought i had a great UID

5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[lousyd]

If your organization is only 100 people, and you get 5 to 10 support requests per minute, one wonders if you're doing something wrong.

OTRS

[alexborges]

otrs is ITIL compliant, has a webservice interface and generally rocks.

We use them and so should many others.

Another great one, but really complicated to deploy, is RT.... but its pretty cool, its what CERT uses AFAIK.

Re:OTRS

[nicolas.kassis]

I second the choice of OTRS. Good system.

Re:OTRS

[isn't my name]

We too use otrs. It allows for e-mail creation of tickets, the backend data is stored in MySQL and we use in-house Crystal Reports expertise to extend reporting. You can create custom fields.

The administration is not as well documented as it could be, but the mailing list is active.

I had not heard of RT, so I can't say how it compares, but otrs works well for us.

Re:OTRS

[Lumpy]

Nice part of OTRS is the ability to set up caned responses that point to online docs that tell the user nicely..

STFU, RTFM you ID10T!

It has saved my company's sanity. I have about 30 canned responses setup to "remind" users that the answer is right there in the wiki, go there and read this, if you ignore us and ask again, you will get the same response over and over and over.

I also like how you can create rules to automatically fire them off to users based on keywords. If set up right OTRS will save your life.

Plus if you are forced to not have a linux server, you can easily find a windows install package that will do it all for you, installing the DB, apache and all other stuff to get it working in place.

Re:OTRS

[McNihil]

I agree with OTRS being one of the best perl implementation that I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of beep-beeeeeeEEEP.

OTRS user/admin since 2005 and I am not willing to part with it.

Re:OTRS

[Anonymous Coward]

Another vote for OTRS. We've been using it for about two years now and are very happy with it.

Re:OTRS

[Anonymous Coward]

ITIL compliant?

ITIL is a framework and one of the first things you'll learn on an ITIL course is that there is no such thing as software being "ITIL compliant".

Re:OTRS

[sumdumass]

While pointing to key words in articles is nice for you and all, how does the customers like that?

I know several customer I have who I personally think just get lonely and want to talk to someone for $85 an hour. They call and ask stupid questions like How do I find a file I saved in the "My Documents" folder because word opens to his last saved directory or something. I have one guy who calls about every three to four weeks asking me what his password is for Quick books. I usually have to tell him to look on his monitor right by the note that says read this before calling me. There is another who keeps asking why he gets all these popups all the time, they are Vista's notifications like A virus scan has started and so on. There are a few more idiots like the girl running an accounting service from her home who saw the file server "just sitting there" and donated it to her church because they needed a computer then wondered why she couldn't access anything. It was a pretty nice file server too for a one man operation, a raid 5 setup with an external tape backup that has a 7 slot robot changer (I picked up second hand for about $200 because she never backed up or changed tapes) and VPN into my network for off site backups. The day she complained she could get any work done, the church called and asked for the passwords to get into the computer which I headed off with "a mistake has been made".

Most people who can't search for an existing document with an existing solution are the people who need hand holding anyways. I don't think it is too much of a problem if they are willing to pay for it and most of them are. Maybe I'm just an Idiot magnet but for some people, the personal service is what they want in customer service.

A note about the Quick books password, This is on a home system with just him and his wife present, no account numbers that correspond to anything in real life and keeps track of his charitable donations so he can report them to his accountant. I know sticky notes with passwords aren't a good thing, but there really isn't anything sensitive in it. The only reason he has a password on the file is because someone told him it was a good idea. That's also why he has a yahoo mail account, a Gmail account, and a hot mail account that he can never access because he forgets where the page you log in from is. I think he's loosing his mind (Alzheimer or something) but amassed a small fortune during his working years and doesn't like feeling useless.

Re:OTRS

[_Hellfire_]

otrs is ITIL compliant

Sorry but I had a good look at the demo system, feature list and screenshots.

There is nothing to suggest that OTRS is even remotely close to "ITIL compliant".

Re:OTRS

[Anonymous Coward]

CERT doesnt use it AFAIK. But JANET-CERT (the uk academic network CERT) got the people who wrote RT to build a custom version for CERTs, which is used by many (if not the majority) of CERTs around the world. RTIR it's called, but you dont want it. In fact you probably dont want RT. You'll need 1 guy full time just keeping it running.

Speaking anonymously as someone who did the original RTIR design, before realising what a nightmare RT is.

Re:OTRS

[lukas84]

As a service provider, i think it depends on your billing model.

We mostly serve smaller businesses (20-150 employees) and charge everything by the hour. Thus, as long as i can charge the customer, i'll do whatever i can to help him.

Mostly this is high level stuff that the internal IT guy can't handle or doesn't want to handle, but i've spent an entire afternoon to sort the holiday pictures of the CEO of a small company. Cost him 185.- per hour, but he didn't seem to mind.

But everything changes if you're working for a large service provider, like IBM GS, where the customer just pays a flat rate and you have to close tickets as fast as possible, as customers will call up with every little thing because it doesn't cost them anything.

Re:OTRS

[Lumpy]

Mine's for an internal group no outside customers are allowed to submit tickets.

All outside customers must call and talk to a tech after giving their account information, Then we will gladly talk to them all day long.

I'd never make a paying customer use a trouble ticket system, but then we charge 30% higher than all other companies around us. We prefer the clients that are tired of talking to a call center somewhere else. we cater to those wanting to talk to a US resident and someone highly trained after the first ring.

we don't even have a call processor running, 2 ladies answer the calls and direct to the call pools.

Re:OTRS

[drinkypoo]

I know several customer I have who I personally think just get lonely and want to talk to someone for $85 an hour. They call and ask stupid questions like How do I find a file I saved in the "My Documents" folder because word opens to his last saved directory or something.

If supporting these people supports your business model, don't use the feature.

I have one guy who calls about every three to four weeks asking me what his password is for Quick books. I usually have to tell him to look on his monitor right by the note that says read this before calling me.

If you charge him for this, don't use this feature. If you don't, use this feature just for him.

There is another who keeps asking why he gets all these popups all the time, they are Vista's notifications like A virus scan has started and so on. There are a few more idiots like the girl running an accounting service from her home who saw the file server "just sitting there" and donated it to her church because they needed a computer then wondered why she couldn't access anything. [completely irrelevant anecdotal information deleted]

The answer is always the same. Does supporting these idiots support your business model? Okay, then support them. Most people want to spend their time working on things which bring in money, and if these things bring in money, that's fine. Many of us also want to work on NEW things, we DON'T want to deal with the same shit day after day. For those of us imaginative enough to get bored, it's good that there are tools to help us get some of those hours back. Every time I answer the same question a second, third, or ninth time, the world gets a little dumber - either I'm not explaining right, the other party isn't listening, or there's just no progress to be made because they're never going to understand. I'm glad there's people like you who want to field those calls, but I'm not one of them. (Hence why I never put an ad in the paper to do random computer work for random people I don't know, don't want to know, and probably won't like. Can you tell I'm not a people person?)

Re:OTRS

[noc007]

Here's another for OTRS. For a FOSS ticket system, it's the best one with LDAP and AD support. The interface is a bit cumbersome and some of its quirks take a little getting use to; however, I haven't found a pay ticket system that wasn't like this. There are a couple of features that it's missing, however the only ticket systems I've found to have those couple of "nice" features cost $50,000+. The interface is quite basic/fugly with the Courier font used almost everywhere, but this can be remedied with creating a new skin template. Overall OTRS worked fine for the 120 employee company I work for.

The only reason we stopped using it was we ran into a quirk that made its way to the C-level executives. Apparently there is a limitation as to the size of the e-mail it's going to download and process; OTRS just left the oversized e-mail and a couple of other standard sized (few kb) in the POP3 account and we never new it. Obviously there are things we could of, maybe should have done to check on it. This prompted us to move towards a pay setup where we have someone who we can call up and yell at and also make feature requests that, if reasonable, get put in within a year time frame. I wouldn't expect that from FOSS unless I had my own developers actively writing and contributing to the project.

If you're in need of a free ticket system with LDAP integration, I would suggest OTRS and I'd probably use it again if circumstances required.

Re:OTRS

[Nick Number]

Nice part of OTRS is the ability to set up caned responses

Ouch! Do you work in Singapore?

Come to think of it, this might be a good option for certain particularly stubborn users.

Re:OTRS

[sumdumass]

I'm purely outside support so I guess we are dealing with entirely different types of people.

Anyways, I was curious is you had those types of people and what they thought about it but it looks like I read in between the lines and assumed something that wasn't.

Re:OTRS

[alexborges]

Yadda yadda: it support itil clearly.

Happy?

Re:OTRS

[alexborges]

It supports ITIL processing well. Thats all I meant.

BTW, this is as a (free) add-on, its not on the base install.

Re:OTRS

[steppin_razor_LA]

We support ~200 users and have found OTRS to be a good solution.

Re:OTRS

[sumdumass]

Oh, they pay for it.

A lot of times, it's an older person who owns one (or part of one) of the companies I service and he normally has a secretary or people for the tasks he doing but wants to do something on his own or whatever. Cutting them off would probably end up dropping several companies with between 5 users up to 50 users which is in my target model. Of course the smaller companies aren't as profitable as the larger ones but they seem to keep me busy when the larger companies aren't. I sort of look at it like having to wine and dine the client or something along those lines except they get the bill.

And don't get me wrong, It's not all the time either. It's not even daily. It's more like once a month, every couple of weeks or something along those lines that I get a couple of calls like that. They just stick out so much and are so memorable.

I don't mind putting up with idiots, most of the time, we are having to deal with people that are less intelligent then ourselves, or at least how we see ourselves. I have a good way at dumbing down complex explanations of processes and making the customer understand the depth of the problem or the fix in terms that they can relate to. Most of the time they are paying me good money and need to feel secure in that they are getting something for it. I never considered myself a people person either but I'm starting to wonder now.

Re:OTRS

[turbidostato]

"This prompted us to move towards a pay setup where we have someone who we can call up and yell at and also make feature requests that, if reasonable, get put in within a year time frame. I wouldn't expect that from FOSS unless I had my own developers actively writing and contributing to the project."

You know you can get on someone to yell at or ask reasonable feature requests to with OTRS, don't you? (http://www.otrs.com/en/support/).

Wesley

[Deadeye550]

Fire your current staff and higher more computer literate individuals

Re:Wesley

[icydog]

Fire your current staff and higher more computer literate individuals

Perhaps they are trying to "higher" English (or whatever their language is) literate individuals.

Re:Wesley

[Anonymous Coward]

No hablo the english, tu insentivo clod.

I hear Good Things about RT

[IMightB]

Unfortunately, my company uses the godawful Siebel.....

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Liberum

[mahohmei]

http://liberum.org/

I installed this with a user base of about 200 people, and it worked beautifully.

It uses ASP, but before pulling out the pitchforks on me, it was on an IIS server I already had in internal use, and it integrated with Active Directory beautifully. Users could go to http://servername/helpdesk and be at the helpdesk with no authenticating--only a one-time questionnaire for name, department, and room.

Re:Liberum

[j303045]

We used Liberum for several years, but I wanted off the IIS model. We completely rewrote it as a pure LAMP app running on an OpenSUSE 9.3 box, and have made a few tweaks over the years. Still running it now, and it looks for all the world like Liberum to this day. We did adjust the colors a bit, just for a changeup.

Re:Liberum

[InsertWittyNameHere]

I'm running Liberum as well, we have 350+ users that we support. Works decently. Not very easy to make modifications without rewriting the whole thing though. We only get 10-15 tickets per day.

I couldn't find anything else that was FOSS that authenticated with Windows AD.

Re:Liberum

[natxo asenjo]

Well, you did not search properly. You can have RT authenticate to any ldap server (so also AD); setting it up does not involve using a mouse, though. You'll have to use a text-editor (an ability that seems very rare nowadays). Oh, and read some documentation. But it works, I know that for sure.

Re:Liberum

[drinkypoo]

Are you distributing your version? (snarky aside: from the Liberum home page: under the GPL license and free for use - guess I won't have to use my PIN number at the ATM machine, and maybe pay during COD delivery. do you trust anyone who can't vet their website for correctness of language to do the same with their code? This is their public face, it's like going out to give a speech on national television without brushing your teeth.)

Re:Liberum

[Anonymous Coward]

OTRS Does LDAP

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[luchaugh]

My HelpDesk supports a user base of 5,000 with 300+ installed applications, and we wouldn't get 5-10 / minute. Yikes.

Open source help desk suggestions

[Amigan]

Here's a website that lists many of the open source helpdesk options: http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/ The only one I have experience with is ZenTrack and both the users and helpdesk folks found it easy to use. jerry

Re:Open source help desk suggestions

[Presto Vivace]

Congrats on being the first comment to offer a constructive suggestion.

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[Bryansix]

Never underestimate the retard capacity of a sales department of about 75 people. Next keep in mind those positions turn over completely in about a month.

CalemEAM

[Shark4126]

Got CalemEAM running over here. It has a massive number of features, but you can limit it to only the work order portion if need be. Open source and super customizable: http://eam.calemeam.com/eam/

Yes, RT

[br00tus]

We used RT at my last company. Keeps track of tickets, with different ticket queues, and different user groups. People can do it by web or e-mail or both. You can search the system for old tickets as well, although it's not a good idea to search the body of the message if you have a lot of tickets going back many years.

Re:Yes, RT

[dskoll]

We use RT and it works very well for us. We don't have a very high volume of tickets (we're up to about 14000 in 5 years, so only about 8 tickets/day on average), but RT is insanely flexible and customizable and has excellent e-mail integration.

Re:Yes, RT

[sqldr]

If there is one piece of software I never want to use again, it's RT. It's all fine until you start modifying triggers and templates. First there's the evil, kludgey combination of bad perl and bad Mason which you have to write overlays to, then once you've done this, you can't upgrade! If you upgrade, all of your overlays break. So you end up stuck with an out of date version with patch on top of patch. Interface is a little ugly too.

Re:Yes, RT

[Anonymous Coward]

RT may be fine for the helpdesk, but forcing your customers to interact with it should be punishable by going out of business.

Re:Yes, RT

[Jason Hildebrand]

It's all fine until you start modifying triggers and templates. First there's the evil, kludgey combination of bad perl and bad Mason which you have to write overlays to, then once you've done this, you can't upgrade! If you upgrade, all of your overlays break. So you end up stuck with an out of date version with patch on top of patch.

Yes. If you make customizations, then you need to maintain them and update your patches to the current version.

This issue is not specific to RT. It is a fundamental issue of software development and revision control, and will affect you any time you make local customizations to software.

Perhaps you think it would be (easier|cheaper|Soviet America) if you had some shrink-wrapped proprietary software which you couldn't customize?

Re:Yes, RT

[aftk2]

In the modern world, well written web software can be customized to a large degree WITHOUT hacking core files.

Re:Yes, RT

[sqldr]

You make an interesting point, but customisation would be easier through a plugin architecture than an overlay architecture.

I once drunkenly came up with the "ultimate" ticketing/helpdesk/change management/blog/journal/incident management type thing which had the basic class of a ticket, and attributes. Each attribute is a class, and displaying a ticket would in turn draw every class.

So instead of writing overlays, you write attribute classes, which get included in polymorphic tickets as they are created and adapted to whatever function they end up in.

eg. 3am. Database breaks. File incident report. Many people add "comment" attributes the following morning. After much discussion, a resolution involves marking the ticket as an "ongoing problem". So the "problem" class gets added. Now the ticket has various boxes on it, and classes need prioritising. comments go to the bottom. Eventually someone comes up with a plan. This requires a "recommended action" attribute to be added. The action gets signed off. Now it becomes a change request. Change request attributes get added. Now it needs scheduling. Start date and end date, and dependencies get added, and a person is assigned to the different work bits. Eventually you can draw a waterfall chart of who needs to do what to permanently resolve the database issue which went off at 3am 2 weeks ago.

Of course, I'm not covering all cases - people may wish to add more attribute classes, but as long as they are dynamically loaded as extras, rather than being overlays of existing code, it should all fit together quite nicely.

Roundup Issue Tracker

[Ulf667]

http://roundup.sourceforge.net/

FOSS, not freeware, web-based issue tracker written in Python. It's extremely flexible and customizable to your needs, as every organization is different.

It comes with an embedded webserver so you can get it running quickly, and of course it works with apache/mod_python.

As for email, you can create, update, and close tickets via email using keywords/value pairs in the subject line.

I miss this ticket tracker. I work for a consulting firm where we need to handle multiple clients and time tracking w/ billing, so that's a bit beyond roundup's mission. We're using Autotask, and nobody likes it.

Liberum

[SoupGuru]

I really liked Liberum when I used it a couple of years ago. It's really simple, web based, and can use Windows integrated authentication which was really nice at that job. Might not be exactly what you're looking for but I thought I'd mention it since google doesn't find it very well.

http://liberum.org/Default.aspx

Liberum Help Desk

[Scozza]

I used Liberum Help Desk for a similar user base with great success. It's free, easy to modify, well supported & very stable. Give it a try (-:

!foss

[daemonburrito]

n/t

Mantis

[_Pablo]

http://www.mantisbt.org

Re:Mantis

[ducomputergeek]

Mantis is good for bug tracking an application. We used it internally before we switched to using google code and/or a private SVN/Trac hosting for development projects.

I'm not sure how well it scales. We were just using it between 5 developers and 60 end users. On average we only filed less than 5 bug reports per day, and most of those were between the development team members saying their latest revisions broke someone elses code.

Re:Mantis

[Anonymous Coward]

Mantis is awesome - simple, elegant, and most importantly - designed in such a way that it can be used both for helpdesk AND requirements engineering / tracking.

The only weakness of Mantis is that it doesn't support PostgreSQL and Oracle out of the box, so if one picks Mantis, they're either stuck with that piece of crap MySQL "database" pretending to be RDBMS and corrupting data (since 2003!), or modifying the code to get Mantis to work with Oracle (I've done this).

Re:Mantis

[ivoras]

Mantis is not really built to scale - it's one of those applications that are philosophically in line with MySQL - lots of small queries repeated wherever needed, not really elegant database layer. But for the workload that it's built for - small teams and/or products (I'd say about 20 developers / 200 users is an "optimal maximum" for it) it rocks.

PhpJunkyard Helpdesk

[Anonymous Coward]

phpjunkyard.com has the Helpdesk software that we use. Its pretty nice, and includes a knowledgebase too.

Avoid: OTRS; Try: RoundUp

[David McBride]

We deployed OTRS locally when we had to deploy something open-source off-the-shelf quickly, and it's proved painful. It might be possible to make it do what you want with more time and customization.

Since then, I've seen RoundUp appear, and it looks most promising, though I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

Re:Avoid: OTRS; Try: RoundUp

[xenocide2]

Are you sure this isn't a grass is greener thing?

IRC

[Collinp6]

What about IRC? Its simple, you can PM people with specific questions, its free and open source, and it has many web-based clients.

Re:IRC

[pbhj]

IRC is so dated, twitter is the way forward ...

Web Help Desk

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Help Desk

Excellent product + includes AD integration.

SysAid

[DrVoltz]

We've had good results with http://www.sysaid.com/

How about GLPI

[EvilGrin666]

I work as a network manager in a school in the UK. We use a French Helpdesk system called GLPI. We also use OCS Inventory as recommended to populate the database with our hardware. Overall the solution has a few minor quirks, but if teachers can cope with it I don't understand why office drones can't!

Re:How about GLPI

[CGarst]

GLPI is great. I deployed it for a small software firm, it really keeps things organized. Using it with OCS seems interesting, but we did manual population via inventory audit.

Re:How about GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed GLPI and it works pretty good for Change control and product inventory. :beer:

Re:How about GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

I second the GLPI + OCS solution.

We recently implemented this help-desk at our office of about 150 users and it's working great so far. It's open source, web-based and single sign-on enabled with AD. You can add follow-up on tickets and the requester get it right in his mailbox.

Also if you want to add software and hardware inventory, the OCS module is doing a good job but it's not mandatory if you're just looking for a help-desk. It's pretty neat tough since you can link your hardware and software with vendors and contacts in the GLPI interface, there is also an integrated financial module where you can manage warranty and depreciation of your hardware.

GLPI and OCS makes a great combo to keep everything IT related in small enterprise well linked together in a single interface.

Re:How about GLPI

[Linker3000]

Another vote for GLPI. We use it for a support desk covering 26-sites and I am just about to implement OCS Inventory. It has its quirks, but is simple to use. Reporting and proactive job priority/SLA management could be better though.

HEAT Tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

I know its a little off topic, but at my company we use HEAT and its so frustrating that many users will do anything to avoid submitting tickets. They will all simply send emails direct to Tech Support because its easier. Has anyone else used this software? And how did it work for you? HEAT isn't FOSS, but im still curious for my own learned-ness. Thanks

check out otrs

[DarkOx]

OTRS is what we use. Google it. Its great and its FOSS. If you know a little perl you can make it look and act anyway you want.

Service Desk for Linux is free

[Anonymous Coward]

The free ServiceDesk offering from AdventNet has been treating me well for a year now. We installed it on a vm, and I haven't touched it. The downside is the free version only supports one technician. For me, that's fine, as I am the only one who takes care of my company. It is a great product, easy to install, features galore!

Linux installer:
http://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/91677414/ManageEngine_ServiceDesk_Plus.bin

Spiceworks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not open source, but its great help desk software!

Not opensource but free/ad driven.

[ljaszcza]

Well, this is not open source but free. I use and so far like Spiceworks. Spiceworks uses fairly unobtrusive IT related advertising. We are a small business, about 30 users, less than 1 question/day. Spiceworks has some nice tracking and monitoring features besides the helpdesk. Helps me keep track of errors, low disk space, new software installs, etc.

Spiceworks

[mc1138]

Spiceworks is light weight, free, I don't think it's open source though, but its fairly customizable. It has e-mail connectivity, so you can have it monitor an address and have tickets auto-create in your system. It also has network monitoring built in to track health of your network. Lots of cool features, plus an online community. It's limited to window's as a platform for running, but it can work with linux, and Mac's. Plus it can run on an XP machine so no need for an expensive server. Check it out. http://spiceworks.com/

EnterTrack

[__aamisb9940]

...we've been using this for about three years; suits our needs.

Tickets can be submitted via web interface, or email.

Decent support in the forums, too.

http://entertrack.sourceforge.net/

Kindof in the same position.

[blhack]

We have about the same number of employees and "helpdesk" currently consists of:

10 DIAL BLHACK'S DESK PHONE!!!! --- No answer
20 DIAL BLHACK'S CELL PHONE!!!! --- No answer
30 SEND BLHACK 30 EMAILS ALL MARKED AS URGENT --- No answer

goto 10

In all honesty, about 90% of these questions are things like "I'm trying to download and it keeps saying that thing!", that "thing" is usually dansguardian telling them that they are not allowed to download .exe. Or "the things aren't going across" where the "things" are records and "across" means updating them in the database. This is about 100% because they are alt-tabbing between 4-5 session and have the record locked in another one.
Point is, really high volume of the exact same questions every single day. We need something so that they can see from way back 20 minutes ago when they asked the exact same thing and what the answer was. "Close the 4 other sessions you have open" or "you aren't allowed to download .exe's, if you need some additional software, get your manager to request it for you".
What am I getting at here?

Have you ever considered just writing your own tool to do it? I've found that the majority of the time, writing simple tools like this ends up being a lot easier than using somebody else's. Reason being that a lot of times you end up using their tools for something CLOSE to what they were actually intended for.
Me working through it in my head sees it as something very much like a blog, except instead of stories, you have trouble tickets. The Ticket number is the story's ID and the comments are how the problem was resolved.
A lot of times, my problem is that other people's solutions also seem to have a LOT of bloat on them.

Okay, sorry, I'm rambling here (long day of fighting with the machines...). My point is that you should try writing your own helpdesk software! You might even get a bonus for it! :-D!

Re:Kindof in the same position.

[Max Littlemore]

There's no reason not to use some existing FOSS solution and then modify it to your needs. OTRS, Mantis, etc, etc have a lot of features that a helpdesk will want. If you want to add answers to FAQs, you can, you can build in whatever you want. You have the source.

My point is that I think the best approach is to figure out exactly what you want, find a FOSS tool in a language/toolset you can support that is a close as possible to requirements, then modify and close any gaps. If you're feeling generous and your work is generally useful you can give something back.

I think you're more likely to get a bonus for that than wasting a heap of time re-inventing the wheel.

By Neruos

[Anonymous Coward]

When did slashdot become "please help me at my job" place?

OTRS

[jnnnnn]

Wikipedia (and my little IT Consulting company) uses OTRS for this sort of thing.

JIRA

[Anonymous Coward]

JIRA is open source and runs on anything:

Atlassian JIRA

Re:JIRA

[1_brown_mouse]

I support this at my work. It is fairly simple.

Free license for Student/academic/non-profit.

Java based install with Tomcat and MySQL. Does do email account monitoring and response.

Low customization overhead out of the box but easily customizable.

Re:JIRA

[Anonymous Coward]

For normal for-profit companies it has a cost though.

Re:JIRA

[Grobbendonk]

Not FOSS, and more an issue tracker than helpdesk software (although a lot of people who implement it as an issue tracker end up dumping their existing helpdesk software and moving on to Jira).

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[Anonymous Coward]

I get contract work calls because Siebel is on my resume. I explain that I've helped 3 departments in 3 different companies stage active revolts against Siebel, demonstrating exactly how badly it sucks for anything but sales contacts, and override the VP who clearly got the pretty demo with pretty Gant charts, the permanent invite to 3-martini business lunches with Siebel "sales reps", and probably the weekly blowjob to get them to commit their companies to it. I then explain to the recruiter that any company using it should be expected to fail outright or be bought out at pennies on the dollar by a more competent company.

So far, I'm right, 5 for 5.

OTRS

[AMuse]

I've had fantastic results using OTRS to support both research scientists in a professional organization (8 sysadmins, 350+ scientists), a web-based document repository with a few thousand users (And 2 support staff) and a volunteer parrot rescue with about 50 staff, hundreds of volunteers/adopters and 2 support techies.

It's free, open source (LAMP) and having hacked at the source code I can say that it's VERY Solid and well-written Perl. With mod_perl2 even an older Linux box could handle the load.

Write your own, seriously.

[Gavin Scott]

Service, whether it's software, hardware, helpdesk, whatever, is very hard to generalize.

Everyone wants to do things their own way and everyone has some weird little set of extra requirements. So every package that's available has already choked to death and drowned in features that most people will not need.

You get web UIs with tabs containing tabs containing hundreds of fields, of which a typical customer will probably use about 2-5%, and they'll end up stuffing information into them that they weren't originally intended to contain.

I really can't think of an application domain that cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case.

G.

Re:Write your own, seriously.

[Gavin Scott]

Sigh, I mean "I really can't think of another application domain that so cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case".

A service application is at the core of any good service organization, and should be seen as an asset rather than a liability.

G.

Re:Write your own, seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

My last two companies both wrote their own helpdesk solutions. Both were staffed with half a dozen programmers. Both - since they were constantly evolving products - were staffed with their own special helpdesk team. Both ended up being terrible in their own special ways, and neither the approach we took nor the end result would be desirable for a "small firm."

There are many incredibly desirable features that end up being surprisingly difficult to implement. The idea helpdesk system almost always ends up being its own custom email client, custom CRM system, custom CMS, integration between each, and then integration with complimenting services (e.g. company LDAP for access control, Salesforce for CRM integration, etc). None of these are easy problems.

The belief that a custom solution is necessary isn't uncommon. However, once you actually start building your own helpdesk platform the challenges and feature creep can be daunting and hard to avoid.

I made a similar mistake myself while attempting to implement a simple open source LMS. :)

Re:Write your own, seriously.

[timmarhy]

omg no. if there was ever anything that was done to death and was very generic, it's helpdesk ticket systems.

if you try 4 or 5 of them in a test environment and you still find you are trying to bend it into odd shapes, it's a good indictation You Are Doing It Wrong.

writing your own generic solutions belongs on the daily wtf.

Re:Write your own, seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really can't think of an application domain that cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case.

Wait ... so you should write your own? Huh?

Re:Write your own, seriously.

[lanner]

Read the headline. Small firms may not have a development staff to pull this off.

Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[jkrise]

http://www.oneorzero.com/

We've been using this tool for more than 6 years now. Excellent code, easily customisabele... it's written in PHP. We've modified the default software to include SMS, email alerts, SLAs etc. Initially we used it for Helpdesk, but now we've extended it to Accounts, Leave Management, Purchase Requests, General Administration, HR dept. and even for Bug Tracking in s/w development.

Reply under this post and I will email more details.

Re:Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding right? Excellent code? I'm working on a ooz installation right now and basically rewriting the entire thing. It's some of the most laughably bad code I've ever seen.

The developers seem to be unaware of the concept of classes, and instead just have a 5000 line file full of functions that may or may not be used that gets loaded by every page.

They are blissfully unaware of joins in SQL so you'll end up with some pages that make hundreds of database queries.

They have never heard of pagination so if you view a long list of tickets, they'll all be shown on the same page.

Never heard of CSS so they use tables for everything.

No idea about proper HTML structure so you'll have forms that open in one cell and close in another.

I could go on and on. OOZ is good for a laugh but not much else.

Re:Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[MrMunkey]

I used to use One or Zero at my last company. Out of the box it's okay, but like you said it is quite easily customizable and serves as a good starting point.

I had looked into eventum a little bit. It's a good backend, but it's lacking a customer facing portion to be complete. I find that managers sometimes want to track their department's tickets to know who is submitting what tickets, etc. One Or Zero worked well for that.

Re:Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to agree with a lot of your post. I tried to inject some of my extensive knowledge of Help Desk/Call Centre best practice & workflow into the OOZ project but was constantly shot down. I tried to tweak a few things in code to make them work in a more useful way but gave up. I ran with OOZ for about 6 months before moving to GLPI - which also has its quirks, but a much more approachable dev team.

Re:Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[mreine]

I would be interested in seeing a demo of your use of onezero.com I work for a church and and need to implement a ticketing system and it would be nice to have hr, etc. use it also as you described. Thanks merle.reine@therocksandiego.org

Re:Try One or Zero helpdesk software...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be interested in more information on this, please. Please contact me at tim_d_bohn@wieb.uscourts.gov.
Thanks

try http://www.beetil.com

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want it managed for you , try

http://www.beetil.com

it goes much deeper into ITIL than just helpdesk functions but it works well for helpdesk alone.

Cheers

Cerberus

[Anonymous Coward]

Cerberus works out very well for us. We've been using it for 3-4 years, and it's been very stable. We have even taken advantage of the source being open and added a couple of our own modifications.

The license is free for 3 users or less, and their commercial license is very reasonably priced.

http://www.cerberusweb.com/download

vtiger

[Anonymous Coward]

We've just adapted http://www.vtiger.com/

It's pretty much SQL/PHP based and quite easy to customise. New version is due pretty soon ...

Only thing it is lacking is project management to an extent.

We tried OTRS but it was a little too complicated for what we needed.

GPL issue tracker

[netguy-mike]

I had a similar need about a year ago to find a low cost issue tracking software and ran across a real gem. BTNET is asp.net/c#/SQL server based tracking software that is remarkably customizable and with the SQL backend you should be able to scale as large as you need. I think you will find it a possible fit for you.

No need to look far

[Kugrian]

I use ask.slashdot.org.

Double Choco Latte

[codeDr]

We started using DCL http://dcl.sourceforge.net/ for tracking issues with moderate success.

It seems to have been designed with help-desk tracking in mind ...

MailManager

[weegiekev]

Try mailmanager - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mailmanager/ It will scale well (up to 100k tickets per day if you push it), and it lacks some of the major restrictions of RT in terms of workflow.

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[dickens]

I especially love how Siebel (used by a certain EDI provider) makes the user type his question in a tiny little box in a tiny font. Seems to assume I'm running 640x480. Makes me want to reach through the internet and throttle someone.

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like many big businesses that get so big certain market segments "just have to use them". For auto dealerships it is ADP and Reynolds & Reynolds, both of which suck (I have experience with both) and by all rights should have been replaced (or forced to seriously upgrade their systems) but are somehow able to hang on to a stranglehold. I'm guessing the weekly blowjobs help quite a bit. But how do you put that onto your business plan for a startup to replace them? "Oral Masseuse Professional" at $x/week?

ruQueue

[dskoll]

I took a look, but ruQueue seems only to work with MySQL. One of the pluses of RT is that it's somewhat database-independent; we use it with PostgreSQL. Since we use PostgreSQL for everything else, we don't really want to install MySQL just for one app.

Why is it that so many PHP programs only work with MySQL? Is it because PHP lacks a decent equivalent of DBI?

Re:ruQueue

[dskoll]

YIPE! I took a closer look at ruQueue... can you say XSS attacks and SQL injection, folks? /me mails the authors...

Re:ruQueue

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that so many PHP programs only work with MySQL? Is it because PHP lacks a decent equivalent of DBI?

No, it's because PHP is a toy language and needs a toy database to go with it.

When you're ready for a real ACID database, like Postgres, Oracle or MS sql, where things like valid data aren't afterthoughts, you'll realize the limitations of PHP and move to a real web platform.

Re:ruQueue

[Anonymous Coward]

No surprise. XSS and SQL injection attacks are strongly correlated with the use of PHP and MySQL.

Re:ruQueue

[Jane Q. Public]

PHP and MySQL kind of grew up together. That is probably the main reason.

Re:ruQueue

[flex941]

And that is? The real web platform? Java-based? Jesus.

Re:ruQueue

[that_itch_kid]

XSS and SQL injection attacks are strongly correlated with bad coding practice.

Don't get me wrong, the problem is probably more prevalent with PHP as PHP is such an easy language and thus attracts a larger number of amateur/incompetent programmers. That doesn't meant you can't write secure code in PHP.
I'm currently re-writing a logistics system in PHP, and sure enough, XSS/SQL attacks would have been child's play in the original code (Even from the login page).
I can assure you every single one of my database inputs is checked for injection attacks (Even those that came directly from PHP built-ins like time()), and every piece of data that goes onto a web page is checked for scripts as well.

Writing secure code can be a difficult process, but it's not impossible even with PHP.

Re:ruQueue

[AlXtreme]

Why is it that so many PHP programs only work with MySQL? Is it because PHP lacks a decent equivalent of DBI?

Nope, there are a number of database abstraction layers (PDO comes to mind).

PHP programmers (at least the kind who code directly with mysql-statements) tend to do things as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. The amount of tutorials and snippets that also do so simply keeps the average PHP programmer coding against MySQL, and only MySQL.

Re:ruQueue

[krunchyfrog]

IIRC, there is a Pear package that works very well with most databases, you only need to specify a variable for wich one you're using...

Kind of like (maybe some errors, havent done php for a while):
$sql_type = mysql;
.database_command_bleh(database,$sql_type);

I remember I had to look for it because I needed the flexibility to change from mysql to mssql or postgresql.

Re:fuck you all

[owlstead]

And there was I thinking that the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome does not extend to written text. Boy, was I wrong. I feel for you, little troll.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Request Tracker

[DaMattster]

I really like Request Tracker. I think it is hands down, the best open source Help Desk Software. It can be used in solution ranging from Help Desk Management to Queue Management. It also has excellent documentation. An O'reilly book was written about RT so you can get a nice amount of assistance getting it going and even customizing it.

Re:Request Tracker

[RGRistroph]

I second the recommendation of Request Tracker, or RT: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

However I have not used many other systems, although we tried to do this with GForge (GForge has come a long way since we were using it).

Also, I have found the people on #rt on irc.perl.org to be polite and helpful, even when my questions were stupid. Thanks guys !

DaFyre

[dafyre]

We've been using the Liberum software since I don't know when, and it has worked great for us. Liberum.org

GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

The community college I work for uses glpi. Written in PHP, it's very customizable, can track hardware and software, and integrates nicely with LDAP as well.

For the chat queue, OpenFire

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp

The FastPath plugin does web chat request queuing/logging/etc.

check out glpi

[Anonymous Coward]

It's widely used in Europe, and we've found it suits our needs quite well.

http://glpi-project.org/?lang=en

Has plenty of other features as well.

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[EEPROMS]

If your organization is only 100 people, and you get 5 to 10 support requests per minute, one wonders if you're doing something wrong.

Spoken like someone who reads specs but hasnt ever designed products that interact with end users. Answer me this question, do you buy a product designed to meet your average needs or one that meets your maximum peak needs ? When I read the request submitted I immediately understood he/she were talking about the maximum worst case scenario.

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not Siebels fault. Its whoever did the customizations for that particular deployment.

Siebel is an pretty amazing system, which I would love to have a look at the source code for. Just look at how Siebel Tools ( aka what you customize Siebel with ) is actually a desktop implementation of siebel .

PHPSupport

[flyingfsck]

This one works: http://aeronetworks.ca/phpsupport.html

Web Help Desk Software

[SpikeT]

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

Re:Web Help Desk Software

[drinkypoo]

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

Re:Web Help Desk Software

[SpikeT]

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. :)

Re:Web Help Desk Software

[SpikeT]

Touche...."FOSS". Well, you can get my rant about FOSS in this thread at http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1142577&cid=27012719 ;) :P

Not OSS...but has worked great

[Anonymous Coward]

We have 500 users and 4 locations across the us...we use Spiceworks.

It's free as in beer, enjoys a great user forum and frequent updates.

Windows focused of course, but works with email and web based user and admin.

Works for us

[Grincho]

Funny that this is modded funny. Here's how we use IRC at our internal consultancy at Penn State University to field questions from our 70-or-so clients. Combine with Mibbit and a copy of supybot, and you've got brain-dead-simple-to-use semisynchronous communication that also spits out Googleable logs.

Good Help Desk Software - Liberum

[foxlakeawp]

Liberum Help Desk Software is an excellent classic asp-based help desk solution. It is very easy to setup and use. I work at a much smaller company, less than ten help desk techs. It has worked well for us for over three years.

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks is what you want. Free as in beer not as in speech tho.

another OTRS vote

[Sjobeck]

OTRS (can integrate to any auth' source and or any DB) GLPI (haven't dug in yet but looks nice) I wonder how we all can integrate XMPP in to OTRS? Sounds interesting & do-able but then again why not just use email or HTTP. I am laughing at all the responses who call both the poster & his users morons for the quantity of questions they have. Sounds like they need a Wiki (to use as a FAQ) & to point the users to before submitting their ticket.

umm this is not correct

[teknosapien]

My company has 65,000 users and a desktop client staff of 5, supervisor included. we are a mixed enterprise shop of Unix, VMS, Windows, Linux This staff doesn't include networking/operations/system administration staff, SO you either have a real non-tech base of customers(read Monkeys), your tech's never really fix an issue and they are repeat calls, and/or something is very wrong with your hardware/software configurations, if your handling that many calls, just maybe you should spend this time not looking for a bitch platform and invest this level of effort into setting op a good ticketing and event correlation analysis. Set up a basic Linux box and basic monitoring tools( nagios (FAN maybe?)), etherape, Nmap and use dig and the other stuff like that Just my thoughts...

How About Sharepoint Services 3.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a license for Windows 2003 or above you can install Sharepoint Services 3.0 which has a helpdesk component. It's included in your license just like the POP3, SMTP, IIS, and Media Services are.

It's not the full blown Sharepoint, but it's very feature rich. The helpdesk integrates with your AD and in IE uses pass through authentication. It works with Firefox well enough, though no passthrough authentication.

It's not FOSS, but who doesn't have at least one w2003 server?

Re:How About Sharepoint Services 3.0?

[xous]

Well... he did ask for FOSS.

I'm surprised this isn't marked as troll.

Re:How About Sharepoint Services 3.0?

[Killjoy_NL]

It's a valid suggestion though with good motivations.

Very interesting.

[Jane Q. Public]

I always thought this was called "IRC".

Re:Very interesting.

[Gorobei]

Pretty much, but private with full audit trail, etc. As always, many in-house groups sought to kill it and replace it with something less anarchistic, but those efforts failed because the managers saw that a problem-queue approach would destroy the sharing of institutional knowledge.

Re:Very interesting.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Congratulations on having enlightened management people.

They've been on the endangered species list for 40 years.

Re:Very interesting.

[conspirator57]

I thought they'd gone extinct sometime back in the 90s. ;) Maybe there's hope for some of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_birds

(And Trac)

[Grincho]

I should mention that we use a ticketing system (Trac) for more involved stuff, but IRC is great for quick or rapid-fire-interactive requests.

What you REALLY NEED

[Jane Q. Public]

... is a way to cut back on the questions. Seriously. Putting a better help desk system in place might solve the symptoms, but dude, at that kind of question rate your operation, whatever it is, has some kind of disease and that is what you need to cure. Something about that operation is very badly designed somewhere.

Re:What you REALLY NEED

[tdvaughan]

Yeah, but you need the data to decide on a good response. Turns out that the best way to get data on support requests is through a ticket tracking system.

Re:What you REALLY NEED

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but how many ticket tracking systems will allow you to gather useful data in 20 seconds while also answering a question? Seriously at this rate you're better off defining some general categories, handing every help desk person a copy of a sheet with large boxes for each category and getting them to put in a hash mark for each category (with a not-listed category). If you don't know what those categories should be, then your 3 help desk staff will probably have an idea about which types of problems they get the most. At the end of the day tally it all up and find out which are your biggest problem areas, and then the next day repeat the process with more detailed sub-categories for the biggest problem areas.

While you're at it, have a separate sheet for each person who is generating a call to see who the biggest call generators are.

Do that for a few days and then address the biggest problems. It's not worth spending a lot of time on setting up a help desk system for a situations that's broken and not representative of the long term.

The disconnect here

[symbolset]

The problem here is that what you need is a dispatcher support system, not a helpdesk support system.

A dispatcher support system has things like maps to objects and a website for checking inventory levels. Your dispatchers are experts who field questions about that sort of thing, and are keyed into the systems where the questions are answered. The previous poster is correct that chat rooms work well for this. If your reps are local, radio works well too.

A helpdesk system creates trouble tickets that are tracked, assigned to service reps and accounted for. They're for blocking issues where nontechnical workers need technical help. If you had 5,000 customers and you're seeing two calls a minute, there's a major network outage and your call center stops entering tickets in minute two - if they can enter tickets at all with the network down. For a normal tech shop one or two tickets a year for the average customer is a pretty reasonable expectation.

A trouble ticket system would work well for those questions that need escalation and all of the available trouble ticket systems can support thousands of trouble tickets per minute because they're automated technology solutions. Your problem will be not letting the tickets get out of control. You'll need to teach your dispatchers not to create tickets if they can find an answer in less than a few minutes.

That said, have you tried sourceforge? They have about 500 CRM systems with trouble ticket tracking. Search for "CRM".

Re:The disconnect here

[fava]

A help desk system would have way too much overhead. Each tech would end up spending more time filling out and managing tickets than they actually spend answering the question. The act of filling out a ticket would slow down the system dramatically and the techs would not be able to keep up.

Re:The disconnect here

[symbolset]

I think I said that. What have you to add?

Seconded...

[Animaether]

IRC is great for one-on-one support chats... there's tons of support for it out there in terms of utilities (log file handling, e-mail transcripts to clients, etc.), web-based front-ends (java and 'ajax'), IM client support (all the does-it-all IM clients have an IRC component available), etc.

Sure, you COULD just open up an MSN hotline (do they still charge for this?), but then all your Yahoo-using clients will complain that they have to first install MSN (though Yahoo! does MSN now, I suppose), and vice-versa (and that's ignoring AIM and the like).

We've been using IRC for internal and client chats for years now and so far haven't seen a good alternative.

That said.. IRC itself is pretty archaic.. the network simply isn't set up for e.g. voice chats, whitewalls or even sharing files (DCC can not be relied on as working - instead, we have an HTTP upload form and an FTP; any files uploaded from there will be displayed to the support persons working the account on IRC itself, from where they can go to the file, etc.)

Cerberus Helpdesk

[waa]

Giving up my mod points to recommend Cerberus

Re:Cerberus Helpdesk

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't FOSS and you can't even search comments

JIRA

[ajcoon]

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

Kayako Support Suite

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.kayako.com/

They are cheap, but they have a great product. It's not free, but a license is only $300.

Help Desk Pilot

[sriramv_iyer]

I tried Help Desk Pilot for some time - There used to be a free version for limited users. The support is also pretty good. I am not sure if the free version is still around. It's worth checking out http://www.helpdeskpilot.com/

it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[CBravo]

I've looked and looked. Most OSS tools only provide 'tickets' and maybe 'inventory'. In my book a (ajax web-based) helpdesk application consists of a little more:

-user management, including imports
-problem management
-change management
-configurable email responses (get mail when you report a ticket, when you get a ticket on your name, ...)
-good comprehensive overviews
-reporting
-searches
-some sort of wiki which is integrated.
-selfservicedesk where a user can review and update incidents

There were only two (below 10k$) commercial options I could find (and I used to work at the second shop):
-ManageEngine
-Topdesk Mind you, Topdesk has a codebase which is a mess which makes development a bitch. It is however very slick to use.

In general I find that in niche markets only commercial shops provide a comprehensive solution. Maybe there should be a place where software developers with an itch can see what features are wanted for an application of type X (here: helpdesk).

Flame away for un-advising OSS ;-).

Re:it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[metamatic]

Redmine provides pretty much all of that and is free open source software.

redmine.org

Re:it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[xenocide2]

Launchpad does most of this. For some reason they've skipped out on the wiki. And it's not open yet, so I can't flame you for non-OSS ;)

Re:it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[CBravo]

It seems to lack change mgmt and SLA's but for the rest is looks like the most usable I've seen in OSS (last time I looked was a year ago).

Thanks for the tip. Funny that you are the first to mention it in this thread.

Re:it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[Anonymous Coward]

I've looked and looked. Most OSS tools only provide 'tickets' and maybe 'inventory'. In my book a (ajax web-based) helpdesk application consists of a little more:

Let's see:

-user management, including imports -> OTRS does it (while why you would want it when you can plug it directly to the original user datasource?)
-problem management -> OTRS does it (by means of seggregated queues).
-change management -> OTRS does it (by means of its ITIL extension)
-configurable email responses (get mail when you report a ticket, when you get a ticket on your name, ...) -> OTRS does it (by those different messages are templatable too)
-good comprehensive overviews -> OTRS does it.
-reporting -> OTRS does it (while, frankly, not as good as it should)
-searches -> OTRS does it
-some sort of wiki which is integrated -> OTRS does it (by means of its FAQ module)
-selfservicedesk where a user can review and update incidents -> OTRS does it.

Not that I'm so fond of OTRS, it's simply that I'm using it. I'm quite sure that at the very least RT can cover all of that too and I wouldn't be surprised other open source tools could do it too.

Frankly, I'm not so sure you "looked and looked" so much.

Re:it is one of the few markets all OSS fails

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking for a web-application. When I go to the demo site I'm not really impressed. Barely usable was not good enough.

Clocking IT

[aristedes]

A Ruby rails open source project might be just the ticket for you. Good project management tool, although it should also work for help desk: http://github.com/ari/clockingit/tree/master You can sign up for a free account on the hosted solution here http://www.clockingit.com/

Do NOT use HOTH

[Anonymous Coward]

Do NOT use House on The Hill. It's terrible.

jaraju

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not opensource but it's free...
http://www.spiceworks.com/it-help-desk/

Ben

[Anonymous Coward]

Go with TRAC, i customized it a bit and it works nice

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[Anonymous Coward]

My helpdesk supported* a user base in the high thousands. It is not inconceivable that we could get 5 a minute at a peak-normal time. If there was an outage or something that can spike, but even then 10 a minute would be intense. Really I can't imagine what would cause such an event other than the network being down, but that kinda kills the whole ticket system too.

* Before this whole economy bullshit, now I think it's somewhere in the middle thousands. Though my personal user base has only fluctuated a few hundred.

qi.jabberHelpdesk

[gogosalman]

is our own open source web to jabber helpdesk. It is written in python, is fully open source, and integrates with plone zope but can also be extended easily to other systems/CMSs.

Re:qi.jabberHelpdesk

[gogosalman]

You can check it out at http://chatblox.com/

SugarCRM

[IAmAI]

Have a look at SugarCRM. May I also recommend this podcast: http://twit.tv/floss32

Re:SugarCRM

[griffinme]

I have been wondering about that. I have been reading about it and it looks really good. I know that it is mainly CRM but it also has a help desk module.

Re:SugarCRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Sugar is a piece of crap. Show-stopper bugs all around, they release too often and too early. Basic stuff is missing, people on the forums are begging these and yet those are pushed to next release again and again. Like recurring events in calendar. Or working webmail. Or whatever.

Stay clear of it. We didn't. It's POS. Period.

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is that they have hot helpdesk staff and the users are desperate.

And of course that's 5 to 10 instant messages per minute. Probably not actual support requests.

If the users had to log the support requests via a web based ticketing system, I suspect that would cut down on the number of requests immediately.

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Try spiceworks (http://www.spiceworks.com/)
It's free and offers more than just helpdesk ticketing

Request Tracker

[Sadsfae]

Where I work (3000+ employees) we make use of Request Tracker.

It's an OSS ticket tracking system written in OO Perl, has a SQL backend, plugs into kerberos and scales pretty well.

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Re:SharePoint or rather WSS

[lukas84]

No, it's not free.

It's part of Windows Server. So you'll need a Windows Server license and the appropriate number of CALs.

I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[Sycraft-fu]

They want a helpdesk. One problem you find with support is that if you make support too easy, some people will stop thinking for themselves. When they can get instant answers to their questions, they just stop trying, they ask first without thinking. So I could see something where it's an immediate communication leads to a situation of people asking tons of dumb questions all the time.

Where I work, that's one of a number of reasons why we insist people send e-mail to the help desk. When they just wander in or call, they are prone to ask simple questions they can answer themselves because they expect an immediate response. When a response will take a little bit, they'll solve the problem on their own.

Sometimes I'll deliberately wait on a ticket, doing other first, if it is something simple I think they'll figure out. Often I'm right about this. We'll get something like "My printer is broken help!!!!" Then 15 minutes later "Oh it just wasn't turned on, never mind."

So ya I think IM based support is probably the worst you can have for that. At least with a phone people still have to call, maybe wait on hold, etc. With IM they can fire it off any time, even while doing other things, but it is still near realtime so they expect a response right away. That leads to a real brain shutdown in many people. They find it easier to just IM support rather than think about anything, so you'll get request after request.

Re:I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[nmp0906]

It has been awhile since I have looked at free ticketing systems, but I seem to remember that outside of OS Ticket there was not a whole lot of offerings. Granted, at the very core, a ticketing system is not terribly complex, but finding one with a good workflow out of the box is the difficult part.

Now I know you said free, but I highly recommend you check out Kayako. I personally have not found anything close to the workflow and capabilities this offers. When I used to work for an outsourced support company (mainly web hosting) our system interfaced with customers' Kayako installations almost exclusively. We were pushing 12+ tickets per hour per seat, and the workflow allowed us to do that effectively.

The single feature I miss the most with my current companies ticketing systems is the ability to put tickets on hold (or close, or other custom status) and have them re-open at a specified time interval, say for future requests. Their suite comes with a chat application and a knowledge base, which I don't have extensive experience with, but know they do their respective jobs adequetaly.

In addition to the web interface, Kayako operates extensively by email if you should choose. Now, most ticketing systems I have used do this, but the thing is Kayako's web interface operates like how you would expect email too. Adding people to tickets is simple with the cc or bcc fields (and people get emailed accordingly on ticket status changes). Like I said the workflow is really effective and the interface is superb.

Kayako is only $300/yr for the suite (or $200/yr for just the ticketing system), which is quite reasonable. There is a 30-day demo available. I haven't checked out all the recent features, but last I checked they were working on some more advanced features like desktop sharing, if that be beneficial.

Re:I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[nmp0906]

Pst: Your first goal should be to document the answer to your questions. After a few days of dedication to documentation, your ticket volume should drop significantly. Also, you never said what industry/business you were in. If you are fielding that many questions, you seriously need to look at your employee training and reference materials. I am hung up on trying to figure out what your situation is that warrants such helpdesk abuse.

Re:I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[BitZtream]

In case you didn't notice the rate at which the questions are flowing in, his users are already well beyond not thinking for themselves.

It sounds more like they are asking the help desk to type and click the mouse for them as well.

Re:I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[bondjamesbond]

I used to work at a place where there was one other sysadmin and myself. The other sysadmin demanded something similar to your draconian way, thinking all questions were stupid and all users were non-thinking idiots and DEMANDED that they submit a ticket via email or OTRS. OTOH, I would gladly field questions any time, anywhere (which really pissed him off). At least I realized that the people asking questions were on the front lines of the company's revenue generating efforts and didn't always have time to "figure out" their technology issues. Interestingly, along comes a downsize and suddenly we don't need two sysadmins; one will do. I was asked to stay, and the info Nazi was asked to leave. Just my $.02US.

Re:I'd imagine that's part of the reason

[rlh100]

I agree with not making it to easy. A trouble ticket system of any type would help. Require your user to submit a trouble ticket each and every time they have a problem. It need not be long or involved. Maybe just what software they are using, what file they are accessing, what the problem is and what the error is. This will do three things:
        Require the user to work a little at asking the question,
        Give you a message with useful information to help solve the problem,
        Give you a record of who is asking what questions.

You can then prioritize the questions: urgent, important and lazy. For the lazy questions you could auto respond with a message saying the question is low priority, you will get to it in the next day or two and give pointers to any self help information available. I suspect that if you are allowed to put a one hour delay into lazy questions, and then respond asking if they solved it themselves you will find most of them resolve themselves.

On the other hand if management really wants you to respond quickly to each question or request they need to budget the staff to do the work. If you assume that each question takes 2 minutes to answer. Remember a single 20 minute answer balances out about 12 or more 30 second answers. So if we average 5 and 10 we get 7.5 questions at 2 minutes a question is 15 staff minutes to answer a real time minute of questions. So... Do you have a helper's staff of 15? If not you are understaffed. The mind set should be call center staffing, not help desk staffing. How many people does it take to answer the call volume.

IMHO what this is really about is changing your users expectations. I suspect you have been giving them prompt painless answers and so rather than go to an online help screen it is easier to just ask the question.

An education point of view to consider is that people tend not to remember easy answers. If they have to look the information up the answer will be more likely to make it to their long term memory.

canned replies

[natxo asenjo]

you really did not look well into it: http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/ ; rtfm is really simple and useful, it works great.

As to your complaints about RT's performance: I am sorry, I cannot recognize any of it. Were you using (old) pc hardware for the RT server? What OS did you install RT on? There has been quite a big problem with the perl version that redhat installed in their OS, so maybe you were bitten by it.

I have run RT with a stock debian etch install and following the fine instructions that came with the distribution getting it working was a mere 20 minutes (ok, ok, I am a linux sysadmin, so I actually do read the docs, so maybe I am cheating). Our production RT was a proliant 360 dl g4 with 4GB ram (quad core xeon, nothing really fancy and it is now at least 3 years old, I am too lazy to look it up now). This is our intranet/internet webserver, being constantly pounded by quite a few webapps by 1500 users. I have not seen any performance issues at all.

Just because it is linux, it doesn't mean that it can make miracles. A database server remains a database server, and you need the hardware for it: fast disks are a must. if you have a virtual environment with fast disks i am pretty sure it will also run without problems.

Since there is no official asset support module, our company moved to topdesk and i can positively tell you that I miss RT a lot while doing tech support to our users. The search function is brain dead, the workflow is brain dead and the web interface is brain dead. It wants to be a desktop app with tabs and that sort of stuff and that really slows you down. RT is fast, simple and like they say in their website:

Help requests without my RT remind me of TV without using TiVo to skip commercials: I can only stand it for a short while

Unfortunately, the asset tracker extension is not part of RT, hopefully this changes in the future (http://code.google.com/p/asset-tracker-4rt/)

Re:canned replies

[trawg]

you really did not look well into it: http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/ [bestpractical.com] ; rtfm is really simple and useful, it works great.

I have barely looked at all - I decided a while ago that I'd rather move off RT entirely and extend our homebrew solution. It's easier for us and we'll get better customisation. I'll check that link out anyway though as it will prolly be helpful for the interim, thanks.

Were you using (old) pc hardware for the RT server? What OS did you install RT on? There has been quite a big problem with the perl version that redhat installed in their OS, so maybe you were bitten by it.

We were using an HP DL380 I think - dual processor xeon, 2gb RAM - it was pretty beefy. We upgraded it to 4gb RAM and got little improvement. But we WERE running Red Hat - so maybe we ran afoul of the perl problem you mentioned.

RT is fast, simple and like they say in their website:

Yep, and I do like that aspect of it. The simplicity and flexibility of it is nice. i just find the resource requirements generally seem to be massively high - a quad core xeon with 4gb of RAM to me seems like MASSIVE overkill for what is a relatively simple web application. That's part of the reason I think I unconsciously am pissed off with it - we had SO many problems with it performance wise that just didn't make sense (so it must've just been some stupid distro-specific bug that was causing it - I was away on holidays when it was resolved and don't know how they did it).

Re:canned replies

[trawg]

Actually just checked out the RTFM thing and it looks really helpful.

I guess I'm (possibly unfairly) comparing it to the awesome snippets that Fogbugz has. You could type, for example:

`nosupport

(backtick followed by a keyword) ... and once you'd finished typing the keyword, it would fill out the entire job. If you had even a vaguely good memory or had spent some time with the system it made powering through many jobs really easy - you could do it all with the keyboard and almost never needed to slow down to use the mouse. Ahh, the good old days.

Support Incident Tracker

[Anonymous Coward]

We're now using Support Incident Tracker or SiT as it's usually called. http://sitracker.org/

We have 70 staff, 300+ clients and over 25,000 incidents logged so far and it works well for us. Might be worth taking a look?

It runs on PHP with MySQL as a backend.

Re:Support Incident Tracker

[modir]

I can only recommend this one too... I have to evaluate a new trouble ticket system last week. And of all the open source products I found this one was the best.

We had OTRS before. OTRS is very good too, but really hard to install.

A friend is using RT. Now with the newest version the user interface looks really good too. And I think many problems mentioned by others are gone.

Re:Support Incident Tracker

[CBravo]

One of my requirements is that all information can be entered randomly. I was surprised to see in the screenshots that this is not the case with sit.

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an IT company that recently migrated to Siebel. You are 100% correct. The company got bought out within months of migrating to Siebel for a dime.

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a user base of around 100 people and use Spiceworks

Discourage them through a long ticket system.

[krunchyfrog]

Make the users use a form. A very long one. Something like Bugzilla, and lots of questions that need to be filled in. Make the users use it. Every. One. Of. Them. For. Every. Question. They. Ask.

1- It will discourage them and they will fill it only when they can't find an answer elsewhere.
2- You will be able to fill up "statistics" of the most common problems and have them fixed by the ratio of complaints.

Well, at least that's how it seems to work where I work.

Re:Discourage them through a long ticket system.

[FingerSoup]

This is only a useful technique providing your workers have ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION. Far too many companies have adequate training or the proper tools to let users figure out some SIMPLE things by themselves, out of security fears. Unfortunately, your ticket method goes against the "If we tell them how it works, they'll figure out how to abuse it" mentality of your management.

As a result your new policy just created a second bottleneck, likely much closer to the front lines, thereby impacting customer transactions. Knowingly inconveniencing front-line staff is NOT something you should take lightly. The answer is to train your staff, simplify processes, Provide the required tools, and have an effective, and expedient escalation path. Your phone help desk people are there to answer the "dumb questions" and common fixes. Your tier 2 should be there to figure out the more complicated long term stuff, or stuff requiring restricted access. Finally, your Tier 2 should be able to escalate to various levels of management, should a breakdown in the internal system be the problem.

In other words, design your system so people don't have to ask dumb questions. When a couple dumb questions occur, have them answered by people who can handle the smart questions - because you never know when you'll get a smart one. Finally, when your smart person can't answer it, have a way to get that question answered by an even smarter person with more tooks, or by management. Spend the money to make this happen. It'll save you in the long run.

Look around on HotScripts or Google

[g35force]

Look around on hotscripts, or google search free help desk software. You will find a lot of free solutions that may meet your needs. A few in .net, some in asp (liberum help desk) and many in php (HelpDeskReloaded.com, OneorZero.com, etc). Look for the ability to easily alter the software, and also what your ability to get support for the software are. Is there a paid support line, or an active forum that you can get help when things go wrong? Also five to ten questions a minute is really high for that user size.

My 2 cents...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd vote for JIRA, could have other synergy advantages too with functions other than SD inside your company.

100 people, 5-10 questions a MINUTE?

[myxiplx]

Dear god indeed!

We have around 100 staff here, and our entire IT team consists of two technical people. At most we field maybe 5-10 questions an HOUR, and I feel that is too high. Very occasionally we won't even take 10 questions in an entire working DAY, and that's the kind of level we aim to.

The vast majority of our time is spent looking after the system, planning future deployments, and generally keeping things running smoothly. Our aim is to have the technology working and simple enough that all the staff can do their jobs without having to contact IT.

If you're seriously fielding enough questions to need three full time support staff something is very, very wrong. Not only is it causing you problems managing it from an IT point of view, but that is an awful lot of productive time being lost by your staff.

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bashing the OP or anything, but this goes to show that the specifications weren't clear.

"we're looking at about a user base of 100 people, with around 5-10 questions a minute"

To me that implies he's got a current user base of 100 with 5-10 Q/min, and he's looking for something better. Not that he needs a system that can handle at most 10Q/min from 100 users.

MantisBT

[ultimatemonty]

my company uses Mantis BugTracker (www.mantisbt.org) as a bugtracker/helpdesk ticket tracking tool. It's pretty simple to use, and is very customizable if you're willing to dig into the code.

What about Mantis?

[mozzis]

We are a pretty small shop, so for us Mantis seems to work pretty well. We have set up hooks bewteen it and our SVN version-control. There is a wiki feature that has some quirks, although I don't have the latest Mantis version which is supposed to improve the wiki integration.

RT & RTFM

[RichiH]

You want RT and RTFM. Period.

Just look at the list of adopters on rt.bestpractical.com

Bugzilla?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I like Bugzilla. It works well for me, and has become much easier to install and configure (with Webmin for administering the MySQL directly, as needed). Sourceforge and RedHat both also use it, so it seems to scale well, and doesn't have the locking problems some of the other systems have.

Is x property out?

[reiisi]

Isn't that a database query?

Re:Is x property out?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As far as (l)users are concerned, the helpdesk is a database frontend.

Re:Is x property out?

[Acer500]

As far as users are concerned, the helpdesk is a database frontend.

Lol, great quote, I might want to sig that :)

You likely want a 'knowledge base' and help desk

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are answering 'common questions' then likely you have common answers. If the staff can 'publish' common answers with key word and staff can provide 'canned' answers, perhaps you can make some of the helpdesk operations self-service can allow the IT staff to work on strateigic goals.

We went from a low-cost per-seat solution (which I'm not going to name 'cause they suck) to one of those mother-of-all-helpdesk solutions that was painful to implement and two years later we're still hiring consultants to make it work with us. (We're not a break/fix internal IT shop, so most products do not necessarily support our model of prolonged customer interaction with many round trips.) Wouldn't recommend either for you. Along the way found a FOSS-based product 'e11' which had reasonable initial fees and provided source, however that wasn't 'enough' for our corporate.

Good luck,

Re:SharePoint or rather WSS

[Anonymous Coward]

- No, WSS is free. MOSS / SharePoint Server 2007 is definitely not free.

- Yes, it is part of Windows

That said, some people already have that as part of their existent infrastructure so there actually would be no extra cost for them.

Not a java programmer?

[killmenow]

So in answer to your questions: No I am not a java programmer, I consider it, much like xml to be an answer to a question that no one asked. I find it like so many of the other "modern" languages to be abysmal in form, function and performance.

C it is.

OS .NET solution

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are interested in an Open Source ASP.NET and C# solution; check out TicketDesk
http://www.codeplex.com/TicketDesk

It seems to have at least one very active developer right now; and I am sure they could use some help.

Thought about getting involved myself. Not using it currently; tried it out briefly.

Pete Gordon

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[killmenow]

...and probably the weekly blowjob to get them to commit their companies to it.

Well, looks like I've found our new software.

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked into spiceworks? (http://www.spiceworks.com)
We use it in our organization to support about 100 users and maybe 200 devices. Two support personnel are easily able to field support requests using the simple web-based helpdesk. It can also support AD integration and email requests.

Not FOSS but well worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in about the same size company and looked for a while for such a solution. I just couldnt find a complete helpdesk solution that had all the features I was looking for. I came across this software http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/service-desk/help.html its not free or open source but its web based, works with mysql and Our company found the cost to be reasonable.

OTRS and JumpBox

[Bu1140G]

We're looking for help desk SW too... I found a JumpBox for OTRS which made my test and trial much easier. You might find other SW there that makes more sense for you as well. Check it out: http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization/

Something simple and can expand....

[Anonymous Coward]

Works with LAMP

http://www.dotproject.net/

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks works for us. v3.6 is much faster and has a lot of bugfixes and enhancements. Good community also; local ug meetings, lots of groups, forums, etc. for getting help and answers. Plus you get all those cool monitoring thingies.

Write your own?

[SCHecklerX]

Seriously. It's probably easier than installing/tweaking somebody else's. Somebody already knowledgeable (you could hire a consultant) in LAMP could give you exactly the system you want in a few weeks, I bet.

TW?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about TikiWiki?

Have people with questions fill out a tracker form (after searching the whole site) - trackers are used in the problem/suggestion forms on dev.tikiwiki.org.

Build an online manual in the Wiki tool, so site search will also search the manual. When a question is answered, answer it in the tracker and update the manual if necessary.

for chat-based support, try CSLH

[the big v]

We offer a "live help" service to our customers. We used to use PHPLive! (paid app) until they vanished out of existence leaving us with several major security holes. We replaced that with Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) which is open source and works reasonably well and seems to be pretty safe. I had it scanned by ScanAlert to test against XSS and SQL injection type attacks, and anything else that may raise alarms for "HackerSafe" certification.

The only feature we want that it doesn't have is "rate this operator" at the end of the chat session.

Open Source Help Desk

[SpikeT]

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

Its made for software development enviornments but

[Anonymous Coward]

trac is easy to customize for helpdesk and includes a nice wiki and is quite easy to extend.

5-10q a minute? Seriously?

[Lousifer]

"we're looking at about a user base of 100 people, with around 5-10 questions a minute."

No seriously ... how are 100 users generating that many questions to your helpdesk? If they're spending that much time on with the helpdesk, I question whether they'd be able to actually spend any time doing their actual job. The neediest helpdesk userbase I've ever dealt with had 1000+ users who couldn't generate more than 250-300 requests in a day. Your users generate 1000% the call volume with 10% of the staff? I call BS or at the very least exaggeration. You don't need a call tracking system, you need a subscription to a suicide hotline for your helpdesk techs.

Inefficient

[wonkavader]

The reason you have help desks is to keep your workers working efficiently. Making them answer their own questions causes two problems:

1. You're now paying them to chat on topics they might not be qualified to be useful on.

2. You're risking having people wait forever for an answer and get less done, or get a wrong answer and waste more time.

A couple of experts with a ticket system that lets them cut and paste responses is the right approach from a financial perspective. If a single user keeps having trouble, keeps asking the same questions, etc, a ticket system will reveal that and help HR make an adjustment.

Re:Inefficient

[Pjerky]

Then only allow the moderators to post replies. Not rocket science here. They still get their questions answered publicly where multiple people can see the answer to the same question and you don't have inane chatter. Take it one step further and say that posted questions won't show until approved.

helpdesk + billing

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone have any recommendations on a product that also does billing? We're using cerberus 3.5 currently with the time tracking feature. while this works it is no optimal and cerberus' reporting features suck. we were looking to move to cerb4 only to find out they have stripped out all of the time tracking capabilities.
since i work at an IT consulting company, we get alot of tickets for support/projects and need to bill for those, can any recommend a system that does both? I know microsoft has a beta helpdesk system but i haven't had time to try it.

Re:helpdesk + billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Tracking is in Cerb4, and has been for months: http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/11/07/cerb4-build-787-released/

Try Kayako

[mreine]

While it is not open source, it is only $500 and works great. It has "live" chat, etc. http://www.kayako.com/solutions/supportsuite/

How about GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

How about GLPI, I have tested here but on small scale, it is an all solution (ticket, inventory with OSC NG, etc.) It has a lot of plugins also.

Wait a minute

[SmallFurryCreature]

You got 100 people asking 5-10 questions PER MINUTE?

Now, my math may suck but doesn't that mean that at a minimum a person asks a question once per 20 minutes?

I wouldn't bother with reviewing your training procedures, I would bolt the gate to the pasture, your cattle has run loose and has taken over the offices.

Seriously, this is REALLY bad, the people you are surfacing are either:

Blithering idiots: There is a credit crisis, fire them and get some better ones. Maybe from the local morgue.

Asked to perform far above their level: Fire the managers and either train the workforce or get another layer in that can handle the tasks that are required of them.

Your training sucks: Improve the training and create an exam for it, those who fail, get fired or are put to work at an appropriate level.

The tools are crap: If the support questions are not due to any of the above then the tools themselves may just be very bad and require a lot of support to keep functioning. For instance a craptastic out of date copier will generate constant support questions to have it fixed. Upgrade your tools to once that have a lower operational cost.

Do this BEFORE you worry about your tech support problem because if you improve your tech support the cause of the problems won't go away and your company will still be loosing a lot of money in downtime while people are being helped no matter how fast and efficient this help is.

Remember that the best tech support is that which is not needed. If the users can use their tools without help and there are no problems to fix, the support staff did their job. A really good fireman never has to put out a single fire.

Trellis works for me

[norttipertti]

I have been using Trellis ( http://www.accord5.com/trellis ) both as a helpdesk and as a problem tracking and management solution between housing cooperatives and building maintenance companies.
It's completely open source and quite easy to modify to different needs.
Creating tickets with e-mail piping sucks big time out of the box, but like I said - easy to modify...

Re:5-10q a minute? Seriously?

[narcc]

Wow, you're way off. The poster is saying he'll have 100 people using the helpdesk software (a pool of 100 support persons) to handle a volume of 5 to 10 requests per minute.

Spice Works?

[Anonymous Coward]

It works for me...

Live Chat

[mahadiga]

I really like Mozilla's Live Chat.
You may try setting up for your needs.

Re:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[jon3k]

1,000 users and >100 apps here and we get maybe 10-20 per DAY.

OSTicket

[robpoe]

How about an extremely lightweight, small but easy to use product. Has pre-canned answers (so you can select a canned answer, hit the button and you're done). Has email capability to open tickets, and when you reply to them -- it sends an email back.

We use it, but are a small 3 person help desk