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."

5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[lousyd]

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.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Does he work at Retards R Us or something?

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:5-10 per minute? For 100 people?

[Bryansix]

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.

IRC

[Collinp6]

What about IRC? Its simple, you can PM people with specific questions, its free and open source, and it has many web-based clients.

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.

Re:I hear Good Things about RT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:RT

[red_dragon]

We're using a much more robust solution called JIRA.

Automatic JIRA or Manual JIRA [thedailywtf.com]?

No need to look far

[Kugrian]

I use ask.slashdot.org [slashdot.org].

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[DoofusOfDeath]

That's one helpdesk question per user every 10-20 minutes.. my god.

They should be proud. That's actually kind of low for a Microsoft shop.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Yes, RT

[Anonymous Coward]

RT may be fine for the helpdesk, but forcing your customers to interact with it should be punishable by going out of business.

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[jon3k]

Since when is 100 helpdesk techs "small"? I must work inside a fucking amoeba...

Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute?

[ozmanjusri]

I must work inside a fucking amoeba.

Until the next exocytosis, anyway.

Re:RT

[Thundersnatch]

So now we kick our apache at 3am every morning and RT hasn't grinded to a halt since.

Restarting IIS nightly used to be SOP back in the Windows NT4 and Win2000 days, but Microsoft cleaned up their act with IIS6 on Windows 2003, which we have never had to restart* for any of our applications.

It's nice to see that Apache has caught up to Microsoft circa 1996!

*Yes, I know about automatic worker process recycling, but that isn't nearly the same thing as a service restart. And yes, I know these boxes get bounced at least bimonthly for patches. I'm trying to make a joke here.