We’re getting overwhelmed by support requests from our latest project and are looking for an open source customer support solution, does anyone have any suggestions? The main functionality required is to be able to divert emails sent to a support address to a ticketing system. We also need the following:
- Allow emails from more than one account to be diverted to the system and converted into tickets which can be assigned to team members according to language.
- Have predefined responses stored in a database which can easily be included as a basis for an email
- Allow specific emails from specific accounts to be automatically assigned to individuals
- Have various levels of importance for support requests
- Should allow the creation of different groups with various role capabilities
If you have any suggestions or experience to share please let me know in the comments.
VERDICT: Thanks again for the suggestions guys, we tried pretty much everything suggested and ended up going with Kayako, which is NOT open source, but has great features and solid internationalization support, the rest were quite weak in this area. We’ve been using the system for several months now and are quite happy with it, it’s been able to handle quite a large volume of tickets being logged in around 10 languages and automatically assigned to the relevant country managers.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Have you looked at eventum from MySql?
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/other/eventum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventum
Cheers,
Nigel
January 10th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
We’re using Request Tracker from Best Practical at work to manage support queues for a large ISP, although it might be overkill for your needs.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Open Ticket Request System
Written in PERL, mature, backed by a company, used by Lufthansa, German Ministry of Externs
Great Documentation
January 10th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Eventum looks robust and comprehensive. It is also very active.
If you want something very simple try ezTicket (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezt/). It’s old, not updated but very easy to install and use. eZticket also supports piping.
Personally, after discovering Eventum (thanks Nigel) I will be converting my eZTicket implementation to Eventum at some point but I have the feeling that it won’t be up and running within an hour as ezTicket was.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I was responsible for the roll out of Request Tracker (though significantly customized) for the University of Washington’s Computing and Communications (central IT department that also runs many high profile networks). MIT also has a large implementation of RT.
RT definitely meets all of your requirements. #1 and #3 would be done with ‘scrips’. #2 would require the installation of the RTFM (RT FAQ Manager) extension. #4 would be the priority field. And for #5 RT has a very rich group and ACL system.
If you have further questions feel free to contact me.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Thanks for the great feedback guys, checking out your suggestions. We’re also doing some testing with OS Ticket and it seems decent and minimal which is good. Last time I used Eventum the new ticket form had around 100 fields ..
January 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
If you are looking for something efficient and minimal I would definitely recommend EZTicket over OS Ticket.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I have just had a look at EZTikect and I have to say that I don’t agree with you at all. Unless there is a newer version that is. The version I found on Sourcefourge is from January 30, 2004 and at a first glance it seems really bad – is there a newer version available?
January 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
No, that’s the only version.
I just looked at the osTicket site any you are right, it is active and looks a much better solution.
I don’t know where I got that idea from!
I will be moving from EZTicket soon, this thread has pointed out much better solutions.
January 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I have a pretty similar problem, a similar problem with a need to outsource to various remote helpdesk but I think I’ve pretty much decided on esupport suite from
http://www.kayako.com. I’ve used this at various ISP’s (where its seems extremely popular) and there is a lot of fine grained control, including being able to ensure that customer tickets are handled quickly. There is even a live chat component, but perhaps you don’t want to go that far!
January 11th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I have just realised how confused I got myself. I am actually using eTicket (not EZTicket). eTicket is a fork of OSTicket when its development went stale.
OSTicket has only recently become active again. There is a very recent release of eTicket.
I have no idea which is better at this point, I think I am going to evaluate both.
eTicket site: http://eticket.sourceforge.net/
Interesting post: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=767094
January 12th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
OTRS worked well for us for years – http://otrs.org/
January 18th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Thanks again for the suggestions guys, we ended up going with kayako, great features and solid internationalization support, the rest were quite weak in this area.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I suggest WebAPP, a multiligual CMS portal:
http://www.web-app.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:20 pm
kayako is not open-source, is it??
April 17th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I had some issues with kayako and their supprt was unable to solve them.
A tool called Bridgetrak works well for us.
It includes everything you need for reliable tickets tracking, easy customizable to any environment and works pretty stable.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:50 am
The tile of the blog says :
“Can Anyone Suggest a Good Open Source Email Ticketing System?”
For some reason http://www.kayako.com as been mentioned a few times but it is not open source, is there something i missed?
October 28th, 2009 at 8:29 am
@Fred – it’s a good point, I updated the article to clarify this point. Bottom line is, at the time of writing, the open source options were pretty weak.
June 28th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Guys, have alook at http://www.focalscope.com, great product been using it for 6 months and it works great.
November 13th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Has anyone heard or used any good systems that integrate with outlook/exchange? I am looking for a simple way to convert customer/employee requests and issues into cases/tickets…possibly within a public folder???
Please let me know thanks!
July 14th, 2011 at 1:53 am
It would be worth your time to take a closer look at http://www.focalscope.com Hope this helps.