Issue Tracking Ticketing Systems?

An anonymous reader asks: "Our company has expanded to 5 employees, and we are looking at setting up and installing an Issue Tracking System for all employees to use throughout the company. It turns out there are many ticketing systems available in both commercial and open source solutions. We originally planned on using Request Tracker but we were unable to implement it due to the complexities of the system. For our company, we are looking for a simple to install Issue Ticketing system (preferably PHP and MySQL based to be hosted on our basic web hosting) to improve both the efficiency of our company, and improve our record keeping of all of our issues. How do you manage all of your tasks, and what software do you use, if any, to achieve this?"

We use Jira

[BigBuckHunter]

We use Jira, it's equally as crappy as any other ticket tracking system out there.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ [atlassian.com]

BBH

Re:

[eric2hill]

Can you define "equally as crappy"? We're looking at purchasing a copy of JIRA to manage project tasks across our organization and I'd like to hear about your experiences, both good and bad.

Re:

[vapfy]

$dayjob recently switched from Bugzilla to Jira for internal project management and bug tracking. (Customer contact and support requests are managed through SalesForce.)

I'm *very* impressed with Jira as a Bugzilla replacement. We're able to track features and roadmaps without having to pester the PM.

Re:

[pnutjam]

I use JIRA. It's nice and very customizable. I had to change some things since it is very software centric and my issues are network and hardware related. It is good for tracking entire projects and individual trouble tickets.

If I could add one thing it would be the ability to auto-open and close a simple ticket for things like password resets and printer installs.

Re:

[MikkoApo]

I've used JIRA at two different employers and it's a very nice product. The interface is powerful and at the same time simple enough (looking at you bugzilla). It works with different databases, but it also has a standalone install which a breeze to install. Comes with nice integration to cvs ( & subversion too I think) and (paying?) customers get the source code too so you can integrate however you like.

The only downside to Jira is that it's price tag (for business users) has risen steadily, but at l

Re:

[JordanL]

I use JIRA at work, and for free you can get Flyspray [flyspray.org], a PHP/MySQL ticket tracking system that is excellent for everything JIRA does minus the Enterprise Level Management stuff that the Bob's at every job want. ("What's this... assessments? Numbers? Give me graphs with multiple colors of how many tickets we're closing!")

Enterprise level

[KDan]

On the enterprise level there's of course the infamous TestDirector from Mercury Interactive, and the equally infamous ClearQuest from Rational/IBM, but these are probably not adequate for a 5-person organisation (more for organisations with thousands of developers, dozens of projects). I too would be interested in finding out what solution can be implemented simply and reliably outside of the corporate world, for smaller companies.

Extra bonus points go to a system that is clear enough that it is possible

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

ClearQuest will create new levels of frustration with your team. It's poorly integrated, if you can call it integration.

TestDirector is probably a little better, but still sucky, and doesn't integrate with anything else.

MKS has a product that's supposedly integrated, but I've never figured out how to use it properly, and their source control product is fundanmentally flawed (no atomic commits - the commit gets logged, put into the DB, before the actual source is processed. If the source fails to process, it

Re:

[otis wildflower]

On the enterprise level there's of course the infamous TestDirector from Mercury Interactive

OMG what a pile of fetid shite, imagine a ticket system that demands ActiveX!

Better RT or Bugzilla than that loathsome junk...

Re:

[jasonla]

Mercury Center's Test Director is a pile of crap. I'm a developer and have to use it because one of our clients use it throughout the entire organization (hundreds of people, testers, developers, etc.).

It installs an unbelievable number of ActiveX components (IE), or requires a separate extension for Mozilla/Firefox. TD behaves nothing like a WebApp. There are no standard page refreshs, but instead, it uses the ActiveX/FF plug-in and tries to feels client side software. It's similar to what AJAX tries to ac

Re:

[KDan]

Totally agree with all the comments about TD and CQ. They are existing options however. I was just mentioning them, not supporting or even condoning them.

Daniel

trac

[GreatDrok]

We had a problem with people harassing the sysadmin (me) to do stuff and I was having trouble with time management and documenting my workload. We already had a trac system (http://trac.edgewall.org/) in place for other reasons and we used this to implement a sysadmin request system where people could enter their problem in trac and their request would be sent to the sysadmin (or a list of people in our case) who would then resolve the issue and report it as such. This produced a nice audit trail showing requests and their resolutions as well as any outstanding issues. Of course, it is all open source and free which is also nice.

Re:

[Tumbarumba]

I'll throw in another vote for Trac as well. For me it hit a sweet spot of not being too complex, yet had the features I needed. I could indicate issue and priority to give an order list of things to do. The timeline and roadmap views were really useful planning tools. Also, the Subversion integration gave fantastic traceability regarding what changes were made to resolve an issue.

Compare this to JIRA, which is a much more full featured tool, yet somehow misses some of the features above that I cared most a

Seconded, trac rules

[Dion]

I really like trac as well, I don't know if it's the excellent integration with subversion or the integrated wiki, but it's really a great piece of software.

Re:

[oyenstikker]

I set up Trac at our 8 person office two weeks ago. I can't really comment on how well it is going because it has only been a few weeks, but I am very impressed with the ease with which you can add fields to the tickets and create reports based on those fields.

Re:

[pasamio]

I'll also jump in for trac. Subversion integration is nice, plus the wiki is awesome, you can link changesets directly from the wiki (Very cool when set up properly), roadmap useful for planning plus the fact it can generate a useful calendar and a timeline to see where you've been. i've used bugzilla in some projects to do things and while it is great for bug tracking, trac gives me far more and I'm happy for the switch.

Trac is not ready

[kunakida]

I use Jira at work, and like it, but Jira is a bit expensive for a one man personal project.
So after looking around a bit on the net, I chose Trac and installed it on my home system to try it out.

Trac looked good. Had an interesting UI. The buzz on the net was favourable.
Took a little bit of effort to install, but then so did most other issue tracking systems.
So far so good.

I entered a few test issues. Still so far so good.

Then I tried to correct those issues. Change the issue type.
Even delete an issue.

Re:

[rmm4pi8]

Like most things, I'd suggest you try installing binaries with your distribution, to guarantee that all of the libraries are compatible, etc. But it sounds like you may just have a database permissions issue--does your Trac user have update permissions on the DB?

Whatevr you do

[JamesP]

if you ever come close to a program called Caft, run like hell

It is the most retarded piece of shit I've ever seen, and "proud to be IE only"

s/Craft/ServiceCenter/

[Dion]

What you said, just replace Craft with ServiceCenter.

Not only is it expensive as hell, but it's also an utter turd of a program that looks and works like it was designed by retarded monkeys on crack.

get yourself a Wiki

[arachnoprobe]

Get yourself a (good, expandable) Wiki solution. You can easily lern & tell how to introduce new tickets als WikiPages, then you have a really flexible solution. And you have something Intranet-like as well. TWiki offers flexibility and lots of features with the integrated WikiForms. Add to that the RSS/E-Mail notification of Topics, and you are set.

RT

[iain]

unable to implement it due to the complexities of the system.

Hire a neighbour's kid to do it for you.

OK, I agree RT takes some investment to get going. As an RT administrator myself, I think it's well worth it. And once it's there, it runs itself.

But if that's really too hard for you, use mantis.

Or M-x todo-mode

Iain.

Re:

[Fallus Shempus]

We are on the 'receiving end' of an RT system; out customer set it up for their users and any issue they can't solve themselves get passed on to us.

We use it a lot, a lot of lots.
The problem is it's slow, in fact it slows done that much sometimes that it's hardly usable, well OK, that may be the hardware...

Except that we were told that the reason it was running like absolute shite for a while was because the admin guy who normally 're-organises the database' on a regular basis was on holiday.

Sorry c

Re: RT

[iain]

Mine runs on a G4 Mac Mini, and it's perfectly snappy.

I realise that's a sample size of one, but I'm sure that's good enough for anyone.

        Iain.

Re:

[rveety]

I have RT running supporting 500+ employees in a school district. I chose it because of its configurability. It integrates with our LDAP servers and is easy for our (mostly non computer geek) users. I agree that the older versions were slow, but v3.6.3 is speedy.

trac, or otrs

[Bitsy Boffin]

Depending on what you want, I'd suggest either Trac ( http://trac.edgewall.org/ [edgewall.org] ), or OTRS ( http://www.otrs.org/ [otrs.org] ). Trac has a pretty basic ticket system, but that's combined with a Wiki and Subversion (don't know if you do coding), while OTRS is a quite powerful ticket system (admittedly, it looks like crap, but it does get the job done) with email piping and all the other things you would expect.

Re:

[Scott Lockwood]

We use OTRS. It has lots of decient plugins, like a calendar, etc. It was about as difficult to setup as 'apt-get install otrs' which was a plus.

Re:

[krack]

I'll second the OTRS recommend (http://www.otrs.org).

I turned OTRS on where I work (250+ employees, 4 FT IT staff) and couldn't be happier with it. The reporting leaves a bit to be desired, as does the "prettyness" of the web-based UI, but the underlying workflow support is pretty solid. There is a lot of customization that can be done just from the web-UI-based configuration. As for the mail piping, we currently have it pulling from several Exchange mailboxes into specific queuees via POP3. The reporting l

We use a combination of

[Centurix]

Mantis and MediaWiki. Works pretty well. We transferred from the .NET demo version of their IssueTracker which came as example code from some Microsoft site, our team installed it on a box in the corner. Then the sysadmin guy noticed it and then used the same software for his job tracking, then the marketing department liked it and they got a version. They loved the .NET thing, we hated it although it did the job. So now we're on mantis and they're using the old one still, until maybe they see what ours doe

Re:

[davecb]

We saw nearly the same thing, but with rap-X [rap-x.com] and a wiki... after we started using them, we got all sorts of folks asking for access. So we turned on rap-X self-registration, so they could use it like the wiki and away they went.

--dave

Don't use Helpstar

[dalutong]

All I can say is don't use Helpstar. We are moving to Altiris now, though I don't actually think it will be any better.

I will be monitoring this discussion closely. I want to know what other people like.

Wikipedia article has a LOT of links

[tobozo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ticket- tracking_systems [wikipedia.org]

Hint : Mantis (GPL) and Cerberus Helpdesk (proprietary) are both php/Mysql based.

Re:

[davecb]

And, being it's a wiki, it would be a Kind Act for someone, perhaps the poster, to add the slashdot results to the page.

--dave

Overkill?

[thegrassyknowl]

I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?

Perhaps just implement a policy that says all requests for change/work/whatever must be formally made by email. Prefix it with [TASK] or something equally dumb and you have a nice way of filtering it into a folder.

It's nice to want to spend the time and implement a flexible, sizeable solution but think of the time to maintain it down the track. For 5 employees is it really worth it? We have about 20 people doing coding/testing (and a handful of other managerial types) on site and we have 1 full time person to manage the issue tracker and source control. That's pretty much all he does (and the occasional IT fill-in when the IT guys take leave).

Re:

[iain]

I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?

If you have more than two issues open at once, you need an issue tracker. Otherwise you'll drop things on the floor.

Obligatory joelonsoftware link [joelonsoftware.com].

        Iain.

Re:

[Nasarius]

No. If there's more than one person involved in a project, an issue tracker is a huge help. Hell, even if it's a solo project that nobody else will ever use, it's a good way to organize your thoughts and keep track of what you still need to do. It takes about five minutes to set up a system like Mantis.

Re:

[Erwos]

I worked in a research lab at NASA with about five employees. We used Mantis to do our issue tracking.

I can say from anecdotal experience that you could not be more totally wrong, at least for some cases. Mantis provided a way for us to keep track of what was needed to be done, who needed to do it, and how important it was to do it - without crawling through our email folders and manually trying to compute what our priorities should be. It was even better for when we needed to deal with outside collaborator

Re:

[GiMP]

An issue tracking system can allow single employee to be more productive. I've worked at (and owned) companies ranging from 1-5 employees, and even with the solo-man case, having the ticket system was substantially better than not having one.

Think about it, if you were a single employee and had a minimum of 30 different issues to keep track of at any time, don't you think that keeping them in a ticket system would be a lot easier than basic email?

I understand your point about using email filtering, but tha

Re:

[gstoddart]

I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?

Well, maybe they hope to grow, and would like a good system in place for formally tracking things now. Otherwise, they're gonna have some crappy, homegrown, ad-hoc system which in a few years when they are a bigger organization is going to fall apart completely.

It's way easier to do this stuff up-front, than try to add it in later when everyone is used to whatever way you've been doing it.

Cheers

Re:

[akuzi]

> For 5 employees is it really worth it?

I think it depends on the nature of your work, but in my experience having a proper task tracking is essential for any team working on a complex software product.

I work in an organisation with 3 developers and we have 1400 tickets in our task tracker. It would be a nightmare to coordinate it all via email.
The system tracks all bugs, enhancements, nice to haves etc.

It gives you a lot of piece of mind knowing that everything is in there and will not fall through the

Fogbugz

[BuR4N]

When we started to grow and get more customers, we needed a new system to handle everything from bugs, support requests and personal TODO lists. We searched and evaluated allot of these systems, we finaly settled for Fogbugz, the combination of features/price was right.

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/ [fogcreek.com]

Its not an PHP/MySQL solution, but that was not an important parameter for us.

Re:

[Boffy]

I can also second this. Very good system. Fast and feature packed. Even has a screenshot client

Mantis

[ericlondaits]

I started using Bugzilla, but then switched to Mantis which I think is much better and prettier. Have been using it for more than a year now, no complaints.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've implemented Mantis in the company I work for. We use it for support ticketing, development issue tracking (which it's more designed for than support ticketing but we can move issues between departments with this one system) and because it's written in PHP it's been easy to integrate it with third party and in-house software to automate previously mundane, manual tasks.

Re:

[j3tt]

I have to agree with this. I was looking for an issue tracking system that would allow me to add custom fields easily. After looking at several of them, Mantis fit the bill. It's very flexible and easy to install. It got me interested in learning PHP too.

Re:

[Undertaker43017]

Another thumbs up here.

I have implemented Mantis at three different organizations and getting ready to deploy a fourth. It's easy to setup and easy to customize.

Bugzilla?

[MaggieL]

http://www.bugzilla.org/ [bugzilla.org]

Re:

[huguley]

Indeed. Bugzilla meets the criteria of being mysql and php. The template system is easy enough to cut out the bits you don't want and add custom fields to keep track of whatever.

If nothing else it is a good place to start since its a download away.

Re:

[WGFELyL5]

bugzilla is actually written in perl [bugzilla.org].

I know I'm asking for it...

[baldass_newbie]

But what about SharePoint (it's free on any Windows box) with the Help Desk template [microsoft.com].
It's easy to install and is extendable.
No, it's not open source. But it's free as in it don't cost nothing (beyond the server license, that is.)

Re:

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

We went the same route. By default it does the job good enough for a small shop at least and we've been able to extend it to do much more. There are many systems with much more specialized functionality out of the box for help-desk type needs, but for us we were already using SharePoint. If you are already using SharePoint and just need a basic system or don't mind a bit of customization, its a pretty good choice. Mainly because as a small shop we are already all overworked. We do NOT want to add to ou

Tracking Systems

[coffee_bouzu]

My team just finished evaluating issue trackers, and the final three that we came up with were Bugzilla [bugzilla.org], Trac [edgewall.org] and Mantis [http] for both technical and political reasons (Mantis is used elsewhere in the company but that's not saying much since we're so big).

We ended up deciding on Trac because of its wonderful integration with SVN, we are using a lot of python in other areas of our team and it is pretty well documented, there is a great wealth of easy to install (but not always well written) plugins [trac-hacks.org] and other than some quirks with the ClearSiler package [clearsilver.net] it is no harder to install than any of the other packages we evaluated. If you use the subversion repository (which can be used for more than code), it is really easy to make links to other tickets, specific documents inside the repository and specific revisions.

However, Trac requires [edgewall.org] Python (you'll probably want 2.5 as the next release will require it) and either mod_python or fastCGI with a compatible webserver in addition to a subversion repository. Depending on what database you choose (SQLite3 is the default but you can also use Postgre and MySQL but the MySQL support isn't perfect yet) you will have to install the appropriate Python bindings for it and if you install the current stable release you will also need ClearSilver (but make sure you check the Trac Wiki before you install as people seem to have trouble unless they use specific versions of ClearSilver).

If you are serious about using only MySQL and PHP, I would suggest Mantis. It certainly isn't the prettiest thing out there but it does work and does meet your required dependancies. However, if you can swing the extra dependancies I would suggest Trac. Good luck!

Roundup

[gclef]

I'm becoming a fan of Roundup (roundup.sourceforge.net) for this sort of thing. It's a bit complex, mostly because it's incredibly flexible (you can change almost everything about the database schema with just a few config file changes). It's also DB-agnostic, so if you prefer MySQL over Postgres (or vice versa), Roundup doesn't care, as long as it can log in & make its schema.

OnTime & TodoList

[joaeri]

Both at home for my own personal usage and at work are we using axosofts OnTime [axosoft.com]. It works really well and a new version is just around the corner. For a single user it's completely free and it has both a web, windows client and a visual studio integration. For the small notes I keep for myself I then use TodoList [codeproject.com]

ServiceDesk

[Jjeff1]

I like servicedesk [adventnet.com] from AdventNet. It seems to work pretty well, it's very easy to configure. I have only 2 complaints.. It's perpetually 95% there. They release features, but don't add the next logical step to the feature. For example, they have a nice reporting module, but you have to be a full administrator to access it. Secondly, don't pay attention to any of their release dates for updates. They always miss their own deadlines by a couple months, and tend to promise more new features than they actually

Issue tracking may be mandatory

[onyx00]

For those suggesting simple solutions like a white board or a Wiki: these are good ideas, but it is possible the users are required to use a formal, controlled issue tracking system. For example, the FAA requires controlled issue tracking with many many controls and procedures in place.

A whiteboard or a wiki would encounter a large amount of scrutiny while trying to explain to a DER (designated engineering representative) how the highest priority issue on the whiteboard got replaced by your five year old w

Re:

[Kymermosst]

A whiteboard or a wiki would encounter a large amount of scrutiny while trying to explain to a DER (designated engineering representative) how the highest priority issue on the whiteboard got replaced by your five year old who likes to draw purple kitties...

What's your five-year old doing at work unsupervised?

Re:

[mabhatter654]

sure, at small office only software shops there's no issue with kids at work... after all, you usually work long hours, if they don't visit you there... on the other hand at larger/professional/dangerous shops there's always the issue of the cleaning help, the janitor, the security guard... all walking buy and "accidentally" erasing your work... if it's important enough to run the business, it needs to be securely put into a computer.

Definitely Mantis.

[Noryungi]

The company I work for, as a sysadmin, has put Mantis [mantisbt.org] in place in order to keep track of just about everything, from bug fixes to feature request to system, network and software management. It works very well, and allows the system group to be on top of users requests. Highly recommended.

TrackIt

[whobutdrew]

This might be a little bit of overkill if you just have a handful of employees, but we use TrackIt [numarasoftware.com]. I believe it is SQL based, its fairly simple to customize views, and there are a bunch of reports that you can run based on what is currently open/has been closed. I wouldn't know too much about those, though, me being just a lowly tech ;-) There are several other modules that you can install that can help keep track of purchasing, software, etc. Therefore my earlier concern that this would be too much fo

I built my own

[biglig2]

My company is in the process of getting a proper helpdesk tracking system with all the bells and whistles in place, but while we are doing that we needed something quick-n-dirty to tide us over until the real system is in place.

Basically, a bit of thought showed that the absolute basics we needed were not that fancy. A way to add a ticket. A way to see that there were new tickets. A way to mark yourself as dealing with a ticket. A way for the manager to see all the tickets.

So I knocked something together in

Got to second Trac

[el_chupanegre]

I'm in a similar situation (albeit we have about 30 employees) and I'm trying to convince everybody that we should use Trac [edgewall.org]. Its Python-based and can use SQLite, PostgreSQL or (experimental) MySQL. It also integrates nicely with a Version Control System (with Subversion preferred), has a built in Wiki system, reporting (with custom queries), timeline, roadmap of releases and search functions for when it starts getting a bit bigger.

At the moment we have an in-house solution which I'm responsible for mainta

Re:

[commanderfoxtrot]

Have you tried using a Trac VMWare image?

Easy to deploy and backup.

Re:

[el_chupanegre]

Funnily enough, thats exactly how I've set it up, because it was just an experimental thing so that I could convince everyone to use it, and we couldnt really spare a server. You still have to install everything though and get it working, although there is a prebuilt installer for Windows that someone has contributed, but its a version of two behind now.

FrontRange HEAT

[taz757]

Where I currently work, we use FrontRange (used to be Bendata) HEAT [frontrange.com]. We're actually using v5 for right now and will be upgrading to v8 over the weekend. We're severely behind. It's been in place for almost 6 years now and we've logged over 113k calls in the software. We're not using it to it's optimum performance though. The software is pretty decent though. It allows you to break down trouble calls to go to different groups (say hardware, desktop support, developers, etc.) and allows the help desk to set

Service Center

[Nova1313]

Just don't touch peregrine's service center. It's horrible. It's slow, doens't work well and it's forever being fixed. We previously used an older version and we upgraded to the newer version with the mentality of "well it can't be that bad".. It still is horrible just not as horrible... It's not configurable and if you have processes to implement it has to be done by an outside company.

Don't use Service Center

[ThePolkapunk]

My only experience has been with Service Center, and all I can say is DON'T USE IT!!!

Heed his warning! stay away from ServiceCenter!

[Dion]

A fellow SC sufferer! I feel your pain man!

I figured we were one of the last companies in the world with that piece of shit software.

The biggest problem with SC is that it's so obviously bad that it's impossible to describe how badly it sucks because you are automatically calling everybody who had anything with buying it complete idiots.

Just to give outsiders an idea of how bad SC is on the scale of things sorted by suckage:
Websphere PHP open leg fracture Windows Staffware Exchange SC

Drop me a line

[bill_mcgonigle]

RT used to be hard to install - I did a few of them back then. Since the advent of yum it's darn near trivial - a few hours' work if you've done it before, and that's mostly configuration, not installation. Granted, it's not entirely obvious how to do it the first time. I've done several via yum, and even have my own managed via yum now (1 rev back on FC5). RT is a good product - drop me a line if you want some help installing it. Follow the link in my profile and send to the address listed there and y

FACETS - internal application

[harryk]

We use a system called FACETS. It's been written internally for a very large client and user base. I've been told it is available for licensing.

Aside from saying that I like it, I'm not sure how I could show you anything. If you're interested in seeing some of it, I could dig into the FACETS Development team and ask if there is a public version.

harryk

Eventum

[Lordrashmi]

This is a shameless plug since I am the main developer, but you should look at Eventum [mysql.org]. It was developed for the MySQL AB support team, and then released back to the community. That last release was quite some time ago but development is active. It is PHP / MySQL based and installs on most systems in just a few minutes. Here are some of the main features:

• Auto-creation of new issues from email
• Email integration - With proper setup, once an issue is created you can use [e-mail]

Vtiger CRM

[yhetti]

We have roughly the same setup, except that we're a small outsourced IT company. After messing with craptastic CRM systems for about a year, I eventually settled on one called VTiger. It's easy to setup, very straightforward to use. Customizing is kind of a pain; it's written very well but it's a steep learning curve for the design. But it is PHP/MySQL, and we've been very happy with it.

Go for Mantis, not Trac

[whitroth]

We recently brought up a tracking system... after going through several. We wound up with Mantis, which wound up having only one minor, if aggravating issue (MySQL password lengths). Trac, we tried to install for *weeks*, and there kept being problems at getting it going. Mantis went up within a couple of days, and that included back-and-forth.

        mark

Wait, what?

[Dion]

I'll grant you that trac isn't the easiest package to install, but "tried for weeks"???

Just find the installation instructions and start working, it took me about half a day, including other tasks and lunch to get trac going the first time.

CVSTrac

[halosfan]

We use CVSTrac [cvstrac.org], and it serves our purposes very well. It's not PHP/MySQL, it's SQLite [sqlite.org]-based, and is written in C, but to me, that just makes it easier to support -- there is one native process, so just one point of failure, no DB servers to monitor (yet, the data is available in a SQL DB), no web servers to configure (though you can set it up with an external webserver if you wish).

It is free, well-documented and is actively developed. It was written by the same guy [wikipedia.org] who wrote SQLite [sqlite.org].

It is also se

Cerberus Helpdesk

[Bastian]

It's hard to say what issue tracking system you'll need without knowing what you'll be using it for.

If you're looking at using it for tech/customer support and sales issues, take a look at Cerberus Helpdesk. [cerberusweb.com] It's a commercial offering, but at work we decided on it because it has a number of features that we found convenient (great e-mail integration, bayesian spam filtering, built-in knowledgebase management, etc.) which I was unable to find matched in any [fF]ree offerings. A 3-seat commercial license i

Cerberus Helpdesk Considered Harmful

[vapfy]

I'm the primary TechSupport guy for a small appliance startup. At prior companies, I've used RT, Keystone, Jitterbug, Remedy, Clarify and a handful of home-grown systems. I haven't had many kind words for any of these systems, and installed Cerberus Helpdesk 2.5 instead. I've been using it for two years of Support operations (20-30 new tickets per day).

Pros: Excellent email integration (even does the Right Thing with In-Reply-To and References headers!). Significantly easier to install and manage than RT. F

Re:

[mikael_j]

Wow, the first person in this thread to mention Clarify.. I used Clarify briefly for a while and I honestly found it a lot more useful than most other systems like it, mainly because it wasn't some horribly crippled in-house software. That said, it is way to complex for most people's needs.

/Mikael

AgileTrack

[dnstevenson]

We have 5 developers and 1 support/IT person. We use AgileTrack [agiletrack.com] to do our issue reporting. We also use agile track to help with our iterations and project planning - it's versatile enough to be pretty good at all of them.

Re:

[dnstevenson]

whoops - meant http://www.agiletrack.net/ [agiletrack.net] (.net not .com!) sorry

One Or Zero

[forkazoo]

I just got One or Zero installed last night. You don't say exactly what sort of issues you are tracking, but you may find that it works for you. It isn't the best written thing in the world, but some of the other stuff I looked at seems worse. One bug I discovered (with help from another guy -- can't take credit for the discovery) is that it fails horribly if you install it in a directory named admin. I'm going to have to submit a bug report and a post to thedailywtf.com about that.

Anyhoo... http://www [oneorzero.com]

Re:

[MadAndy]

It's kinda clunky code-wise, but I did have it up and running in a couple of hours. Had to hack the code to change some of the defaults and the built-in response messages. But other than that, it works well enough for me and my clients.

SupportTrio

[gsandie]

Last place I worked we used SupportTrio [activecampaign.com] for a support ticket system. It's a commercial product but was fairly simple and met our needs well. Also the tech support was always fast and responsive whenever we needed to use it.

There are so much out there

[guruevi]

-I have used RT which is awesome but indeed somewhat difficult. Hire a consultant (like me) if necessary.
-I also have used and implemented BugZilla, it's somewhat pointed at the developers, but good enough for anything else.
-Sharepoint does have an issue tracker implemented, but DON'T USE IT. It's awful, I am currently building a custom issue tracker through Sharepoint and I have to modify just about everything from fields to forms.
-I also used OCS-NG in combination with GLPI. It's pretty simple and has a l

Why is RT too "complex"?

[amper]

I admit, the documentation for RT leaves quite a lot to be desired, but at least there's a O'Reilly book, and once you've figured out the permissions system, it's all good. I'm sure I'm not the only consultant in the world that's figured out how to set up RT, so I would think you wouldn't have any problem locating one.

The great thing about RT, in my opinion, is its flexibility. Unfortunately, that leads to a certain amount of complexity, but you really can do just about anything with it.

GNATS

[Mr. Slippery]

The classic is GNATS [gnu.org].

Or roll your own. We needed to be able to integrate ours with our bespoke messaging system, and it didn't take long to knock out something from scratch in PHP and PostgreSQL. We're about the same size as your group.

Re:

[davidbrit2]

Ditto on the "roll your own" approach. If you've got some familiarity with the principles of issue tracking systems, and also familiarity with the needs and processes of your business and department, then you'll be able to better tailor the tracking system to your organization's needs. The one downfall of prepackaged systems is that they have to attempt to accommodate the needs of EVERYBODY, which rarely works well.

I was able to bang out a system for a company of about 50 in just a couple weeks, and it's be

Further Info from Submitter

[RainierSnow]

Hi everyone,

I asked this question. Sorry for not being able to write to the thread but it was posted up on Slashdot throughout the night. I tried to get to the point in my summary but I can see that it wasn't really enough info.

Some history: My job is to do all of the computer work for our company. This ranges from a 40 page catalog I designed from scratch, online buying website, computer and network tech support, computer training, artwork, and a whole bunch of other things. Before I came here 4 years

Hiveminder!

[SamHill]

I was going to suggest Hiveminder [hiveminder.com]. I've recently started using it for tracking issues at work as well as home. It has lots of features that can be used to support GTD methodologies. It's also usable via e-mail, although I haven't really taken the time to see how useful the e-mail interface is.

Hiveminder also supports tagging, multiple groups (with different sets of people), and the creation of unassigned tasks for a group (which can be claimed by a member) or assigning tasks at creation. Tasks can hav

Why is issue tracking so hard?

[tfbastard]

Why is it that so many have horrible experiences with so many issue trackers? What makes this particular area so difficult to implement?

Custome Ticketing Alternative

[armada]

I was under contract for ABN Amro Mortgage for a couple of years some time ago and, among other jobs, was tasked with identifying and implementing exactly what you are requesting. After assessing all the needs of my client, their timetable for completion and examining what was available I came to the conclusion that nothing out there would serve their needs. Due to the urgency of the situation (thousands of loan refi deals) I decided to build one using Filemaker Pro to use as a stopgap and eventually to se

remote clustering, intergration

[ddent]

I too have been evaluating issue tracking systems recently. I'm wondering if people know of a system that supports replication between two different sites. Consider the use case of an ISP's customer support system for an ISP that has more than one site. If the site that hosts the tracking system is down, customers should still be able to file tickets. When the a site comes back online, changes should be synchronized. Anyone seen a system that does this?

Ideally it would also be integrable with other CRM

Easy in concept, hard in practice

[camusatan]

You'll notice there are ton of packages listed above, and about 90% of them say "Avoid x! It's terrible!"

This is because ticketing systems are really easy in concept - user calls, take down issue, follow up with it - but very hard in practice. For instance, how do you handle taking down which user this issue affects? Drop-down box? (that's usually guess #1 for most packages). Bzzzzt. Try that with more than 50 users. Text field? Bzzzzzzzt. One day you'll have an incident for William Clinton, one day anoth

Tracking Systems - Squishlist.com

[Squishlister]

If you are looking for a product that is easy to set-up and use, you may want to consider Squish ( http://www.squishlist.com/ [squishlist.com] ). It is an online tracking system that offers a four month free trial period. You don't need any special hardware or software and Squish can be accessed from any computer with an internet browser. Squish is flexible in that you can set up fields to collect the data you need. The pricing ($600/year for unlimited users, unlimited projects, and storage of 2,500 issues) makes Squish a

Menturio

[piprog]

We were in a similar situation a couple of years ago and developed Menturio ( http://www.menturio.com/ [menturio.com]) for our internal use. Since we wanted to share it with our clients we prettied it up somewhat. It is PHP/MySQL based. It grew incrementally and now has a lot of features our partners needed (e.g. email based tracking and adding, meeting planning, etc.) but in the last couple of years it did not change much (being perfect:-) -- indeed we are contemplating a 2.0 with a complete re-write to take advantage of

Help Desk or Source Database?

[Gybrwe666]

The original post didn't truly define several of the key points that are required to make this decision. I think that you need to define whether you are simply looking at a ticket management system or something that is more geared towards tracking actual source code and changes, or something in between. I think that the long term needs play a huge issue in selecting the proper tool for this as well. If you are going to be routing user-base information later, or adding 20 more developers, it might make se

Trac and JIRA are the best i've used

[akuzi]

Trac is the best free issue tracker one i've used - a lot more powerful than Mantis, Bugzilla. It has an integrated wiki - which is very useful. It also quite an active developer community and a lot of plugins and macros to do that extend the functionality. Trac now has a lot of the functionality of the commercial issue trackers - configurable workflows, SVN/CVS integration and so forth.

JIRA is a very slick commercial issue tracker. Everything is configurable, including tickets workflows - so you can use it

RT isn't particularly complex...

[NateTech]

... if you're willing to run Debian. The RT packages are decent, if a little old, and work fine.

You apt-get install and set up your MTA to send mail to it, and you're basically done.

Re:

[JohnnyComeLately]

I'm with you on this. I used an old RedHat 7.3 release and had RT up in a matter of 2 or 3 days. How hard could it really be? I guess if I had 0 (zero) experience with Unix (Solaris in my case) it could be intimidating, but I'm not terribly skilled and got through it. Get RedHat up (easy!), put on Apache with the right modules, compile, add MySQL and you're about done. The configuration was a little awkard within Apache, but that's only because all my previous Apache experience was with very straight f

Re:

[aicrules]

Because, while he stated his company grew to 5 employees, he wants to use it "for all employees to use throughout the company" which obviously means they need an enterprise level issue tracking system because that statement sounds like it means more than five, even though it really only means five.