Open Source Free Help Desk Package

[Melbosa]

Hey guys, I am looking for an easy to use Help Desk package for Ticket Management that is open source and php based (hopefully).  I would like it to work via http and email for tickets and updates.

You guys come across any like this?  Most I have found are ugly, bug trackers (so not really for ticket tracking but development), or not been actively worked on...

[Lazybones]

Spice works isn't open source but I am fairly sure it has this.

[Melbosa]

Spice Works isn't very good.  I really one a dedicated Help Desk Package like say: http://www.accord5.com/trellis or http://www.eticketsupport.com/, but both are really stale systems...

[Lazybones]

Ya I don't know of anything free that is any good. As you said most are development based like bugzilla, trac, and github.

Manage engine /Zoho offers a hosted solution but it isn't free.

To telly you the truth I have worked with or evaluated several expensive enterprise systems such as footprints, heat, remedy  etc and found them awful and often unstable.

[Mr. Analog]

BugZilla works pretty well, and has addons for IDEs and a variety of source control solutions like SVN

You can set up email/irc notifications for changes and there are routing / business workflow packages that can be integrated.

http://www.bugzilla.org/

It's easy to set up, lightweight and works very well with SVN (in my experience anyway)

I can't recall if there are easy to set up KPIs but I'm sure you can get the basics out of it.

[Tom]

I like trac. Bugzilla is a pain in the ass to make sane.

[Mr. Analog]

Traq is good too.

I never really hit any problems using Bugzilla. I used it with SVN/TortoiseSVN/Eclipse back in '08 (even back then there was strong plugin support for it), I think we also had a web portal we could expose for customers to enter their own bugs but I can't remember what it was called.

It's pretty slick

[Melbosa]

I don't need to track code changes or bug reports.  No change management, yet, either.  Just support tickets.  Problem tracking.  Its for my business for my client calls and issues

[Tom]

I'm sure they can all do that just fine. But they support tieing in change management. I do personally prefer trac's interface, it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot at least. pull up a demo or something.

[Mr. Analog]

Don't underestimate the complexity here, there's a reason why so many issue tracking tools integrate into revision control / workflow management. If you don't have a software bridge between your change management and your trouble ticket process you are going to need bodies to maintain the links between systems for issues through their life cycle.

Just speaking from experience of course, I've worked with 5 different issue tracking systems; FrontRange HEAT, IBM Rational ClearQuest, Pivotal Tracker, BugZilla and of course TFS. Even for low volume stuff there can be lot of overhead, especially with more rigorous SLAs.

Hell even being able to pull up a report of completed work items pending release vs open tickets can turn into a days worth of work if there are no links between work repository and tickets (not to mention the more important "which work items are still open but the tickets are closed" issues!)

In trying to remember exactly what Rational product I was working with I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_systems

Pretty good comparison of tools, at a glance anyway.

[Tom]

MrA, with those qualifications you might just be able to figure out and make full use of JIRA.

[Mr. Analog]

TBH I really don't want to go back in that world unless I'm managing it myself.

I was on the track to becoming a change manager at one point in my career.

Then again, I had a mental breakdown, so maybe not haha

I worked with more than one system that had a specific team of BAs functioning as bridge between help desk and maintenance development, and in those cases I found that the less software integrating the systems together the more entropy.

One contract I was on they would actually waste 4 hours every Friday going through discrepancy reports with the whole team, just trying to figure out what was actually being worked on, and then what should actually be worked on. In the words of the mighty Chuck Heston: "It's a MADHOUSE! A MADHOUSE!"

[Melbosa]

I've used many commercial products as well, right through with Problem, Crisis, Change, Configuration, Inventory and Asset management with many forms of Code Sourcing and Bug Tracking as well as SLA Service Tickets and Project Management.  And this is stuff that is kewl, stuff that has value and stuff if I make it big with my side business I will look into buying a better product.

But Today, all I want to do is get out of my email all my client's issues and into a tracking system.  Something easy they can see where I am at with a certain issue and something I can search for previous issues resolved.

Looking through the Wikipedia article (which I had done already prior to this thread, but thank for keeping me going back), I don't really see any mature projects there in the free range - save one that seems to be highly focused on Asset and Inventory management with some ticking stuff bolted on.  The list is however incomplete on Wikipedia as I have seen others that didn't make that list such as iTop (http://www.combodo.com/-Overview-.html).

So that is why I started this thread.  iTop is pretty much a one stop shop for ITIL compliant Ticketing Software and Configuration Management.

Free might not be in the cards it seems .  And I really don't want to develop my own.

Trac and Bugzilla - Great tools for developers and IT admin staff - Clients however find the interfaces terrible, confusing and not appealing.  Splash a little Apple sauce on them and maybe it would work.  Unfortunately I don't know how to do that.

[Mr. Analog]

Bugzilla exposes bug submission in a variety of ways through a website, most of which are skinnable. Or if you don't want to bother managing user rights, there is a module that you can hook up to email and have it create or update trouble tickets, which is pretty snazzy if you ask me.

There used to be a few flavours of Linux you could get images of that had Bugzilla pre-installed so you can just have it running without too much fuss and play with it. I'm sure there was an Ubuntu one, but I was able to find the Debian one pretty fast, this version is a bit long in the tooth but is easy to get rolling if I recall: http://almworks.com/vbs/overview.html

Speaking of Ubuntu, you should take a look at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/
I know Canonical used to use Bugzilla but they rolled their own hosted bug tracker.

And if you are thinking of having your issue tracking hosted, Google Code Hosting also offers issue tracking.

The key is setting up good practises at the beginning, ESPECIALLY when you are starting smaller, you can always migrate up to something bigger if you have a solid foothold with an existing tool.

[Thorin]

Does this look like something that would work for you?

http://www.mantisbt.org/

When I needed a free bug tracking tool, I used BugTracker.net: http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html.  At the time I thought it was a pretty ugly interface, though.