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