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I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

donw 16y ago
We're not quite ready for prime-time, but my startup (Mad Wombat) is developing a helpdesk application called Tracker, which might suit your needs, provided you don't mind us still being early in our beta. Tracker is a very tightly focused piece of software; it doesn't have public forums, or a wiki, or a knowledgebase. It just tracks problems, which can be submitted via email, via the web interface, or via the REST API. Now keep in mind, it's still early in our beta. The major features all work, but there are plenty of bugs, which we're fixing as fast as physics allows. Although we do use Tracker as our own customer support and bug-tracking application, so we've got a lot of motivation to make sure that it works. Shoot me an email if you're interested: don@madwombat.com
troels 16y ago
I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.
- ledger123 16y ago
  I love RT. Real solid product with great hackers behind it. And you did not mention that it is open source and takes hardly 1-2 hours if you know your way through CPAN and Apache. The latest 3.8 is not that bad with new theme. I can even do a free install/setup for any non-profit. http://bestpractical.com/rt/ http://bestpractical.com/rt/ And don't forget the http://hiveminder.com/ http://hiveminder.com/ from same company. EDIT: Added links.
- pak 16y ago
  +1 for RT. It's gotten a little prettier since 3.8: http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#s... Incredibly powerful, free, customizable. Expect to learn a little Perl if you want to integrate with external systems, as you can write Perl scripts to handle any transaction. However, it has both the features that the GP wanted out of the box.
- Terretta 16y ago
  In my haste to up vote this, I accidentally down voted. We've handled a couple hundred thousand support tickets in RT, some of them hundreds of interactions long, and it's still scaling happily. Using email for support is liberating and using the web interface is phenomenal too. Can't complain about the licensing, but you'll definitely want someone who knows Perl and or the O'Reilly book.
- hapless 16y ago
  RT has the most seamless workflow imaginable. It puts every other ticket system's e-mail integration to shame.
- dagw 16y ago
  Another vote for RT. It is ugly and looks (or at least looked) really hacky and old, but once you actually sit down and use it, it blows everything else out of the water. RT is the only help desk software that I've used that felt like it was written by people who had spent real time in the help desk trenches, studied the problem up close and actually got the whole help desk procedure.
mecton 16y ago
JTrac
ghshephard 16y ago
Jira. It's an issue tracker that: o Our legal team uses to track contracts o Our helpdesk uses to track 20-30 requests a day. With SLA Timers. o Our Project Teams use to track $20-$30 Million Dollar Projects, with 30-50 subtasks each with independent dates. And, oh, Yes. o Our engineering team uses to track software defects (It's original purpose) The 4.0 product is mind blowingly awesome, particularly with it's _super_ fast full text query (thanks Lucene). And, you can't beat the price for small shops - $10 for 10 users. (It goes up quickly after that, but the inexpensive buy in is great for small companies.)
- Kaizyn 16y ago
  JIRA is horrible. Don't use it if you can avoid it. While it kind of works once it's setup, the software really is terrible.
  - megamark16 16y ago
    What's horrible about it? I ask because I really want to know, not because I'm defending JIRA (which I've never used).
    - piramida 16y ago
      It is big, it covers alot of ground, therefore it has large software product illnesses - complicated to setup, hard to master, tricky to optimize to run fast. However, it is a nice product for some heavy-duty task managing once you have it set up and running, absolutely nothing is horrible. For a smaller project, though, I would roll your own to specific requirements, or would use a smaller package or product - because JIRA does everything and that could be too much sometimes.
    - Kaizyn 16y ago
      The main issue it has is that the management tools are a hack. They (Atlassian) started with a very simple system built around their relational database schema. As more users adopted the system, there was increased demand for a number of additional features to be added in. These have all been tacked in and the fact that they are all an afterthought really shows through in how you setup and manage JIRA projects. From an end user point of view, JIRA is bad because it is slow, has a bad user interface, and really doesn't quite fit most workflows. If you're trying to track a trouble ticket, which is what JIRA was originally designed for, then it will perform the job adequately. However, anything else forces you to fight more against the system design to get things just the way your work process needs to be.
jackowayed 16y ago
Tender (http://tenderapp.com/ http://tenderapp.com/ ) is pretty nice, and it looks like it's almost always cheaper than Zendesk. (I think the only time Zendesk would really be cheaper is if you're a 1- or 2-person team that can get by on the starter plan.) As a support person, I don't find Tender especially amazing, but it gets the job done and never really gets in the way. But, more importantly, as an end user, I find Tender to be much easier and more pleasant to use than Zendesk. I cringe whenever I go to someone's support site and it's Zendesk.
- rmoriz 16y ago
  I was evaluating both zendesk and tenderapp last week. Tenderapp had serious confirmed email problems so I had to wait one day to see mails appearing on tenderapp. This is not the thing we would like as an early startup. We've to evaluate other services now because neither zendesk nor tenderapp are usable (imho)
  - imagetic 16y ago
    Hey rmoriz. I just wanted to follow up on your email issues with Tender. Did you have an open support discussion I could pull up? We certainly strive to provide the best service possible as we built Tender for supporting our own services and clients and are highly dependent on it.
    - rmoriz 16y ago
      My co-founder wanted to give up tender because no mail were processed so I checked google apps mail forwarding and found no errors. As I was unsuccessful I've tweeted to @tenderapp and got a reply some hours later stating that there was indeed a mail receiving problem. As tender/entp also uses google apps, it's kind of scary to see that there was a problem. I mean that's probably the easiest combination to deal with imho.
      - imagetic 16y ago
        Sending email isn't processed by Google Apps though, only incoming. We have a dedicated email server that handles outgoing mail. Sorry about the issue though and I would love to take another look at the problem directly. Some edge cases come up that take some pretty deep digging to find out what's wrong between the main email server and the setup on the users end, but that's typically pretty rare. I've only had that happen on a few isolated instances.
drusenko 16y ago
We have been extremely happy with HelpSpot. The software is awesome to use and was clearly made by someone who spends lots of time using help desk software -- minimal clicks to get things done, automation rules based on predefined responses, etc. It's also extremely flexible, and fairly affordable. We manage a pretty decent request load (many 100s/day) with a fairly minimal support staff.
jacquesm 16y ago
Try trac for a bit. We tried it and got hooked. 5 people doing support, thousands of tickets by now and not a single glitch. The built-in wiki also comes in handy. I had to fiddle for a bit with plug-ins to get email notification and ticket handling to be working properly.
callmeed 16y ago
I have an open source rails one at github.com/bigfolio
sjain 16y ago
You could try Helpdesk Pilot - http://helpdeskpilot.com http://helpdeskpilot.com - saas model is in the making.

I need to setup a helpdesk system next week. Any recommendations? Our key requirement is to be able to reassign incoming tickets and have simple notification to the person it was reassigned.

donw 16y ago

We're not quite ready for prime-time, but my startup (Mad Wombat) is developing a helpdesk application called Tracker, which might suit your needs, provided you don't mind us still being early in our beta. Tracker is a very tightly focused piece of software; it doesn't have public forums, or a wiki, or a knowledgebase. It just tracks problems, which can be submitted via email, via the web interface, or via the REST API. Now keep in mind, it's still early in our beta. The major features all work, but there are plenty of bugs, which we're fixing as fast as physics allows. Although we do use Tracker as our own customer support and bug-tracking application, so we've got a lot of motivation to make sure that it works. Shoot me an email if you're interested: don@madwombat.com

troels 16y ago

I don't recall if RT from Best Practical has the particular feature, but otherwise it's a well-rounded and battle proven solution. It's ugly as hell though.

ledger123 16y ago
I love RT. Real solid product with great hackers behind it. And you did not mention that it is open source and takes hardly 1-2 hours if you know your way through CPAN and Apache. The latest 3.8 is not that bad with new theme. I can even do a free install/setup for any non-profit. http://bestpractical.com/rt/ http://bestpractical.com/rt/ And don't forget the http://hiveminder.com/ http://hiveminder.com/ from same company. EDIT: Added links.
pak 16y ago
+1 for RT. It's gotten a little prettier since 3.8: http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#s... Incredibly powerful, free, customizable. Expect to learn a little Perl if you want to integrate with external systems, as you can write Perl scripts to handle any transaction. However, it has both the features that the GP wanted out of the box.
Terretta 16y ago
In my haste to up vote this, I accidentally down voted. We've handled a couple hundred thousand support tickets in RT, some of them hundreds of interactions long, and it's still scaling happily. Using email for support is liberating and using the web interface is phenomenal too. Can't complain about the licensing, but you'll definitely want someone who knows Perl and or the O'Reilly book.
hapless 16y ago
RT has the most seamless workflow imaginable. It puts every other ticket system's e-mail integration to shame.
dagw 16y ago
Another vote for RT. It is ugly and looks (or at least looked) really hacky and old, but once you actually sit down and use it, it blows everything else out of the water. RT is the only help desk software that I've used that felt like it was written by people who had spent real time in the help desk trenches, studied the problem up close and actually got the whole help desk procedure.

mecton 16y ago

JTrac

ghshephard 16y ago

Jira. It's an issue tracker that: o Our legal team uses to track contracts o Our helpdesk uses to track 20-30 requests a day. With SLA Timers. o Our Project Teams use to track $20-$30 Million Dollar Projects, with 30-50 subtasks each with independent dates. And, oh, Yes. o Our engineering team uses to track software defects (It's original purpose) The 4.0 product is mind blowingly awesome, particularly with it's _super_ fast full text query (thanks Lucene). And, you can't beat the price for small shops - $10 for 10 users. (It goes up quickly after that, but the inexpensive buy in is great for small companies.)

Kaizyn 16y ago
JIRA is horrible. Don't use it if you can avoid it. While it kind of works once it's setup, the software really is terrible.
- megamark16 16y ago
  What's horrible about it? I ask because I really want to know, not because I'm defending JIRA (which I've never used).
  - piramida 16y ago
    It is big, it covers alot of ground, therefore it has large software product illnesses - complicated to setup, hard to master, tricky to optimize to run fast. However, it is a nice product for some heavy-duty task managing once you have it set up and running, absolutely nothing is horrible. For a smaller project, though, I would roll your own to specific requirements, or would use a smaller package or product - because JIRA does everything and that could be too much sometimes.
  - Kaizyn 16y ago
    The main issue it has is that the management tools are a hack. They (Atlassian) started with a very simple system built around their relational database schema. As more users adopted the system, there was increased demand for a number of additional features to be added in. These have all been tacked in and the fact that they are all an afterthought really shows through in how you setup and manage JIRA projects. From an end user point of view, JIRA is bad because it is slow, has a bad user interface, and really doesn't quite fit most workflows. If you're trying to track a trouble ticket, which is what JIRA was originally designed for, then it will perform the job adequately. However, anything else forces you to fight more against the system design to get things just the way your work process needs to be.

jackowayed 16y ago

Tender (http://tenderapp.com/ http://tenderapp.com/ ) is pretty nice, and it looks like it's almost always cheaper than Zendesk. (I think the only time Zendesk would really be cheaper is if you're a 1- or 2-person team that can get by on the starter plan.) As a support person, I don't find Tender especially amazing, but it gets the job done and never really gets in the way. But, more importantly, as an end user, I find Tender to be much easier and more pleasant to use than Zendesk. I cringe whenever I go to someone's support site and it's Zendesk.

rmoriz 16y ago
I was evaluating both zendesk and tenderapp last week. Tenderapp had serious confirmed email problems so I had to wait one day to see mails appearing on tenderapp. This is not the thing we would like as an early startup. We've to evaluate other services now because neither zendesk nor tenderapp are usable (imho)
- imagetic 16y ago
  Hey rmoriz. I just wanted to follow up on your email issues with Tender. Did you have an open support discussion I could pull up? We certainly strive to provide the best service possible as we built Tender for supporting our own services and clients and are highly dependent on it.
  - rmoriz 16y ago
    My co-founder wanted to give up tender because no mail were processed so I checked google apps mail forwarding and found no errors. As I was unsuccessful I've tweeted to @tenderapp and got a reply some hours later stating that there was indeed a mail receiving problem. As tender/entp also uses google apps, it's kind of scary to see that there was a problem. I mean that's probably the easiest combination to deal with imho.
    - imagetic 16y ago
      Sending email isn't processed by Google Apps though, only incoming. We have a dedicated email server that handles outgoing mail. Sorry about the issue though and I would love to take another look at the problem directly. Some edge cases come up that take some pretty deep digging to find out what's wrong between the main email server and the setup on the users end, but that's typically pretty rare. I've only had that happen on a few isolated instances.

drusenko 16y ago

We have been extremely happy with HelpSpot. The software is awesome to use and was clearly made by someone who spends lots of time using help desk software -- minimal clicks to get things done, automation rules based on predefined responses, etc. It's also extremely flexible, and fairly affordable. We manage a pretty decent request load (many 100s/day) with a fairly minimal support staff.

jacquesm 16y ago

Try trac for a bit. We tried it and got hooked. 5 people doing support, thousands of tickets by now and not a single glitch. The built-in wiki also comes in handy. I had to fiddle for a bit with plug-ins to get email notification and ticket handling to be working properly.

callmeed 16y ago

I have an open source rails one at github.com/bigfolio

sjain 16y ago

You could try Helpdesk Pilot - http://helpdeskpilot.com http://helpdeskpilot.com - saas model is in the making.