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?

[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?

[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?

[ozmanjusri]

I must work inside a fucking amoeba.

Until the next exocytosis, anyway.

RT

[dg41]

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

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.

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: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.

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.

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".