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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."
That's one helpdesk question per user every 10-20 minutes.. my god.
What about RT? http://bestpractical.com/rt/
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.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
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.
NO SIG
Unfortunately, my company uses the godawful Siebel.....
http://bestpractical.com/rt/
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
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
http://www.mantisbt.org
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
What about IRC? Its simple, you can PM people with specific questions, its free and open source, and it has many web-based clients.
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!
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Perhaps they are trying to "higher" English (or whatever their language is) literate individuals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I use ask.slashdot.org.
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
I always thought this was called "IRC".
... 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.
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".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.)
Giving up my mod points to recommend Cerberus
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
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.
As far as (l)users are concerned, the helpdesk is a database frontend.