Ticket Tracking and Customer Management? 236
An anonymous reader writes "Like many Slashdot readers, I'm sure, I run a small side business doing IT consulting in addition to my day job. I'm looking for a good open-source ticket tracking system that I can run under Linux, preferably one that also has some customer management features. I'd like to be able to maintain a separate record for each job, along with time tracking, work logs, and information about the customer. Much of what I see on Sourceforge is, as usual, pre-pre-pre-alpha with no actual code. Does anyone have any suggestions for a project that might fit my needs?"
JIRA... (Score:3, Informative)
RT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:JIRA... (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed on RT as First Step (Score:5, Informative)
I have since moved away from RT and now use an in-house designed system. But I still give it two thumbs up.
trac (Score:5, Informative)
It is extremely extensible, and anything not readily available [trac-hacks.org] can be easily created. It didn't take much time to learn the class and data structures and I've modified existing plugins and written a few of my own to support our needs.
Re:JIRA... (Score:3, Informative)
I might suggest Trac [edgewall.org]. It's an open source ticket management system integrated with Subversion. Probably doesn't have the extensive customer management features but with the wiki+ticketing is done quite well and can no doubt be used to satisfy the posters needs.
We use JIRA (Score:5, Informative)
RT For sure (Score:3, Informative)
We are on a mission at the company where I work to replace all email / attachment based work management with it.
You'd be amazed how far you can push RS using the concepts of owner, status, subject line, journaling, parent child / depends on depended on by tickets, auto-notification, attachments etc. all built in.
If you think you need more structured data, you should at least see how far you can get prototyping it first in RT, using its minimal custom fields but also its custom views.
Most ERP / CRM don't have the kind of infinite flexibility of workflow you can achieve using the features listed above. They do however have structured data.
Re:RT (Score:2, Informative)
Re:trac (Score:1, Informative)
Postgresql. You can authenticate with htdigest. There is also a
command line interface so you can automate administration with scripts.
You can also install subversion and browse the source trees through Trac.
Vtiger (Score:5, Informative)
Keystone is still alive and kicking. (Score:3, Informative)
Opensource, non-alpha, many many users active, still being supported and worked on.
(Obdisclaimer. I wrote it.
COULD NOT FIND ANYTHING ?? (Score:3, Informative)
the author did not do a very hard search.
First and for most
And then of course there is JIRA. This may be more for dev work. Most places ive been used RT for anything that MIGHT face the customer and the areas that had 'issues' and 'projects' that would end up closing at some time. But JIRA was used by the devs for bug tracking and coding projects.
of course there are a lot of others
Seriously though. How could you have enough experience and knowledge to run your 'side business' and never have run into either of these projects in your travels. Where have you really worked that they have not used a ticketing system ? Or perhaps you are fresh out of school. But even fresh out of school. I would think that even the dorm network operators would have used SOME sort of ticketing system that you would have been exposed to , if even from the 'customer' side.
If your google-fu is so weak as to have not found these , then I fear for your customers.
there is even a nice wiki page comparing all the products..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_
Re:Vtiger (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RT -- Use RoundUp instead.. (Score:5, Informative)
Its self contained.. a GREAT email interface.. easy to setup and easy to extend.
Re:RT (Score:5, Informative)
Now, it's extraordinarily simple. Initial understanding of some of the rights management will take a little bit of time depending on how complex you want it to be.
Re:RT For sure (Score:5, Informative)
I'd love to hear a bit more about the scaling problems you had over on rt-devel@lists.bestpractical.com. We have end users (some of them paying customers, but plenty of them not) with well over a million tickets in their RT instances without any sort of performance problem.
And I'd certainly love to see patches for anything you had to do to get performance up to snuff. (Since, well, we'd certainly like to improve things if users are running into trouble.
Best,
Jesse (RT's chief catherder)
Re:RT (Score:2, Informative)
And as for making really low level changes, the source can only be described as labyrinthine, and the database design isn't much to speak of either.
As a whole, it's powerful, but messy.
Re:JIRA... (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to use something for external facing issue tracking and make it customer facing straight away I would suggest RT by Best Practical. It is GPL and relatively open as far as brain effort to extend it is concerned. It is also trivial to use for issue oriented CRM/sales which is typical of a service company or consultancy.
It is used as the primary system for tracking customer facing issues by companies with turnover in the billions like NTT/Verio. It is also used by small non-IT companies like my favourite plumbing supply shop http://www.plumbworld.co.uk/ [plumbworld.co.uk]. It is also often adapted to integrate the support, CRM and sales process like in Claranet http://www.claranet.co.uk/ [claranet.co.uk]. Judging by the people on its mailing list it is also running in pilots and internal projects at Audi, BT and a couple of other places.
It has been in stable for nearly 4-5 years now. I have used in my previous job, and while it is not completely free of bugs, it is possibly the best general purpose issue tracking system I have seen so far.
There's a good comparison on Wikipedia (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OSTicket (Score:2, Informative)
Mojo Helpdesk (Score:3, Informative)
Hope this helps.
]project-open[ - Incidents, PM _and_ Finance (Score:2, Informative)
It's an all in one ticket tracker, CRM, timesheet, project management (including GanttCharts), WIKI, form, full-text-search, etc. and it includes financial management. So you can create invoices directly from the time you spent on tickets and projects.
The downside: It uses TCL and AOLServer instead of PHP and Apache.
Re:Eventum (Score:3, Informative)
I'm currently evaluating Eventum for both IT support and generic issue tracking for service departments with no IT component. The only thing that feels beta about it is its obvious origin as a software issue tracker, but it won't require much modification to support generic issue tracking. Other than that, it is very stable, and customizable in a good way, not an evil, "I can't use this unless I completely rewrite the source code" kind of way.
I have experience with RT, and have installed it for clients who absolutely love it. But if you're an admin who finds supporting RT to be a little traumatic, you owe it to yourself to try Eventum. I was able to download and install Eventum in a typically provisioned LAMP environment in 5 minutes without any problems at all. Like RT, configuration requires a thorough understanding of the options, but I had a working evaluation system in much less time than it normally takes me to configure RT. So far, source code edits appear to be necessary only for designing more complex workflow patterns, and I'm guessing that will be integrated into the admin interface before long.
While I haven't properly evaluated email integration, Eventum is appealing because it can handle incoming mail via IMAP. I wish more issue trackers would do this, since I already have a robust email system that works great. I might as well be able to use it without rerouting support addresses through pipes, or creating complicated aliases (though it looks like Eventum supports this, as well).
I'm not done evaluating Eventum, but I didn't want its mention to go unnoticed due to its recent release and small user base. I'm looking for an issue tracker that allows technical and nontechnical support staff alike handle tickets behind the scenes without a requirement for a public interface for the client, other than the email responses we generate. Eventum has a simple but powerful search interface, graphical statistics, reports, internal FAQ, canned responses, phone logging, and time tracking, among other features. The fact that it's offered by a popular opensource software vendor, MySQL, lends hope that it will be actively developed and maintained if it becomes successful. It's so easy to install, it's worth taking a look.