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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.
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.
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
Perhaps they are trying to "higher" English (or whatever their language is) literate individuals.
I use ask.slashdot.org.
YIPE! I took a closer look at ruQueue... can you say XSS attacks and SQL injection, folks? /me mails the authors...
... 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.
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.