Best FOSS Help Desk Software For Small Firms? 321
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."
Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute? (Score:2, Insightful)
He probably means he has 100 people running the help desk not 100 people using the end product.
Write your own, seriously. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes, RT (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I hear Good Things about RT (Score:1, Insightful)
That sounds like many big businesses that get so big certain market segments "just have to use them". For auto dealerships it is ADP and Reynolds & Reynolds, both of which suck (I have experience with both) and by all rights should have been replaced (or forced to seriously upgrade their systems) but are somehow able to hang on to a stranglehold. I'm guessing the weekly blowjobs help quite a bit. But how do you put that onto your business plan for a startup to replace them? "Oral Masseuse Professional" at $x/week?
Re:OTRS (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice part of OTRS is the ability to set up caned responses that point to online docs that tell the user nicely..
STFU, RTFM you ID10T!
It has saved my company's sanity. I have about 30 canned responses setup to "remind" users that the answer is right there in the wiki, go there and read this, if you ignore us and ask again, you will get the same response over and over and over.
I also like how you can create rules to automatically fire them off to users based on keywords. If set up right OTRS will save your life.
Plus if you are forced to not have a linux server, you can easily find a windows install package that will do it all for you, installing the DB, apache and all other stuff to get it working in place.
Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute? (Score:1, Insightful)
That still doesn't sound right. The title says it is for a "small firm". To me, anything under 100 is small. If that's just 100 help-desk staff, I'd expect a corporate base of at least 3000. (1:30 help-desk ratio assumption). That's a far cry from what I'd call "small".
Re:ruQueue (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is it that so many PHP programs only work with MySQL? Is it because PHP lacks a decent equivalent of DBI?
No, it's because PHP is a toy language and needs a toy database to go with it.
When you're ready for a real ACID database, like Postgres, Oracle or MS sql, where things like valid data aren't afterthoughts, you'll realize the limitations of PHP and move to a real web platform.
Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Write your own, seriously. (Score:1, Insightful)
My last two companies both wrote their own helpdesk solutions. Both were staffed with half a dozen programmers. Both - since they were constantly evolving products - were staffed with their own special helpdesk team. Both ended up being terrible in their own special ways, and neither the approach we took nor the end result would be desirable for a "small firm."
There are many incredibly desirable features that end up being surprisingly difficult to implement. The idea helpdesk system almost always ends up being its own custom email client, custom CRM system, custom CMS, integration between each, and then integration with complimenting services (e.g. company LDAP for access control, Salesforce for CRM integration, etc). None of these are easy problems.
The belief that a custom solution is necessary isn't uncommon. However, once you actually start building your own helpdesk platform the challenges and feature creep can be daunting and hard to avoid.
I made a similar mistake myself while attempting to implement a simple open source LMS. :)
Very interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)
What you REALLY NEED (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd imagine that's part of the reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:100 people, 5-10 questions per minute? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps his small firm provides helpdesk services to other firms?
Re:Is x property out? (Score:4, Insightful)