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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."
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.
This must be where pies go when they die.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You really don't know where all that government money goes, do you?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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...
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.