Re: help desk software
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:38:49AM -0400, Matt Shields wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Eric Chadbourne eric.chadbou...@gmail.com wrote: I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? Thanks! Just to name a few off the top of my head. There are hundreds and new ones come out almost every day. RT Spiceworks Kayako Cerberus osTicket PerlDesk PHP Support Tickets Support Logic Helpdesk Help Desk Software OTRS ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
help desk software
Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? Thanks! -- Eric Chadbourne ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Eric Chadbourne eric.chadbou...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? Thanks! -- Eric Chadbourne ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Just to name a few off the top of my head. There are hundreds and new ones come out almost every day. RT Spiceworks Kayako Cerberus osTicket PerlDesk PHP Support Tickets Support Logic Helpdesk Help Desk Software ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00:26AM -0400, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? The only problem I've ever encountered using RT is getting people to use it when they've never used ticketing software before. -dsr- -- http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference. You can't fight for freedom by taking away rights. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On 05/10/2011 10:47 AM, Dan Ritter wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00:26AM -0400, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? The only problem I've ever encountered using RT is getting people to use it when they've never used ticketing software before. -dsr- RT it is. Thanks guys. -- Eric Chadbourne ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:47:12AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00:26AM -0400, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? The only problem I've ever encountered using RT is getting people to use it when they've never used ticketing software before. This is helped somewhat by using RT's e-mail interface... if you can get them to send e-mail to a group address instead of to individual humans, that solves a lot of that problem. You can never solve it entirely though... and some people resist even that much of a change. -- Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Derek Martin inva...@pizzashack.orgwrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:47:12AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:00:26AM -0400, Eric Chadbourne wrote: Hi all. I need to create a tech support dept for a medium size non-profit. What ticket software would you suggest? The only problem I've ever encountered using RT is getting people to use it when they've never used ticketing software before. This is helped somewhat by using RT's e-mail interface... if you can get them to send e-mail to a group address instead of to individual humans, that solves a lot of that problem. You can never solve it entirely though... and some people resist even that much of a change. -- Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss I've learned that there are always some people who want nothing to do with ticket systems. The way I got around this was by explaining to them that a sysadmin's time has to be justified and this was what management wanted to justify how we spent our time. I'll go ahead and start to work on your issue, but as soon as you get back to your desk I need a ticket submitted. I also used the ticket system as a queue for what takes priority over other things and used it to assign tasks to other sysadmins. It was also helpful for rotating who's oncall and who should handle the weekly support tasks. Anyway, you start to learn who will send a ticket in and who won't. For those who won't I tell them that since they continuously forget to submit a ticket, then their issue will have to wait until they have the time to submit one. They learn real quick. -matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: help desk software
On 05/10/2011 06:02 PM, Randy wrote: At one company, I customized the help desk application so that it could be used by the call center to track shareholder issues. That is cool! - Eric C. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 07:14:49PM -0500, Chris O'Connell wrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? Obviously the software should be web based. I also want to be able to run reports about closed items, open items, and who is assigned to what. Early in my career I used Remedy ARS. It's complicated and heavy-handed, but if you have someone who knows how to manage it (we did), it can be awesome. Mostly since then I've used RT, and I agree with others that it's good. -- Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On 02/25/2011 07:14 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? Obviously the software should be web based. I also want to be able to run reports about closed items, open items, and who is assigned to what. RT has been discussed before. http://bestpractical.com/rt/ Most help desk software should give you the reports you want, but you also want the system to be usable by the people who are answering the calls. Years ago when I was with a small company our customers would call, and we didn't track them, but we decided to just keep a manual phone log. One day one of our field people complained to my boss that he never got callbacks. I got out my phone log and threw it right back into his face. In any case, part of the issue is that you have to sell the system to the people who will be using this. So, you might want to think of setting up some incentives to use the product, whatever you choose. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
Sorry, I meant change control, like tracking hardware, software and other changes to systems or softwares. I have a primitive form of change control tracking built into the customer DB I wrote. This allows me to look historically at any changes/problems a particular resource has ever had. Came in handy this week when I made a simple change to my ESXI server's time settings. Later I went to view the real time performance monitor and it didn't work on any of the virtual servers! I looked back at the change controls and found the last change I made was updating the time settings. I reverted to the previous settings and viola! Performance monitoring was working again. On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: On 02/26/2011 08:05 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Thanks Guys. I guess I should have included more information in my original posting. The organization is structured in a very decentralized way. The United States is broken up into 9 regions called Provinces. Each Province has one IT guy or girl. Presently we don't communicate among one another very much at all. While I use a database I wrote to track change controls, inventory and issues what I wrote isn't suitable for group use. I'm trying to organize the first national meeting of our 9 IT people and one of the proposed ideas/questions was what people use to track their work tickets. Given some up coming mergers of Provinces I thought this might be a good time to consider installing a web based ticketing system and letting people use the system voluntarily. We are also exploring a few other open source collaboration programs. Can anyone suggest any open source change management or collaboration tools that might help? It sounds like RT is the suggested ticketing software. What do you mean by open source change management. CVS, SVN, and GIT are all Open Source tools. More recently GIT seems to be in favor, but both CVS and SVN are excellent. We had a presentation on RT at the BLU a number of years ago, and companies were using RT for a number of different types of things. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Chris O'Connell omegah...@gmail.comwrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? Obviously the software should be web based. I also want to be able to run reports about closed items, open items, and who is assigned to what. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Free: osTicket PHP Support Tickets RT (previously mentioned) Not free: PerlDesk Cerberus Helpdesk I've used Cerberus for a couple different places and I have some mixed reviews, at this point with all the changes they have made I don't think I'd pick them again. -matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On 02/26/2011 10:50 AM, Richard Pieri wrote: On Feb 26, 2011, at 8:26 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Sorry, I meant change control, like tracking hardware, software and other changes to systems or softwares. Yep, that's change management. If you're looking for the whole ITIL stack then there isn't a whole lot on the open source front. OTRS has a full ITIL stack available but I've never used it. If all you need is a ticket tracking system then RT should work well. Actually, RT could do the change management. It is pretty feature rich. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
Chris O'Connell asked: Thanks for the advice. So the JIRA $10 is a one time purchase price per module allowing you to install on your own server? Yes, you can google for Atlassian starter license: it's for your own Linux (or Mac or Windows) server, as opposed to the hosted-app product that a lot of these companies provide to monetize everything month-to-month. It's a Tomcat application, by the way. Out of the box, it does most of what you want though you'll quickly find that you want to customize the UI (some basic features need to be configured), and the learning curve for admin is somewhat steep. The company seems to have devoted most of its user-friendliness efforts on the end-user portions of the UI. -rich ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Help Desk Software
Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? Obviously the software should be web based. I also want to be able to run reports about closed items, open items, and who is assigned to what. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:14 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? All ticketing software sucks. RT sucks less. --Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 07:52:39PM -0500, Richard Pieri wrote: On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:14 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? All ticketing software sucks. RT sucks less. This, with the major caution: the success of help desk software depends on people actually using it. Motivation is key. -dsr- -- http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference. You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: Help Desk Software
On 2/25/2011 9:15 PM, Dan Ritter wrote: On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 07:52:39PM -0500, Richard Pieri wrote: On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:14 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote: Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software? All ticketing software sucks. RT sucks less. This, with the major caution: the success of help desk software depends on people actually using it. Motivation is key. The success of help-desk software depends on making people /want/ to use it! I've seen multiple companies buy expensive does everything packages, and then they all wind up wondering why all their customer service problems weren't solved as soon as they wrote the check. Too often, customer support software is crippled by fuzzy thought and lazy managers who won't go to the effort - or spend the political capital - needed to get their front-line support people a well-defined /and enforceable /escalation chain, with access to needed expertise, ability to require help from that's so yesterday coders (who are always out of time), and with authority to ignore it's not a bug, it's a feature salesdroids who want to have all tickets closed before their next visit to a customer. If a support manager /starts/ with a certain software package, he loses: at that moment, he is committing himself and his staff to fitting the corporation to the software, instead of choosing the software which best fits the corporation. FWIW. YMMV. Bill -- I've been up and down this highway, far as my eye can see: No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me. - Jackson Browne ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
