asked on 11/26/2015

Open source customer support/help desk options?

[Admins - please reassign topic selections if there are more appropriate ones - thank you]

Hello all,

Is anyone out there using (or familiar with) an open source help desk solution or customer support portal?

I want to build a customer support portal with all the usual customer support features, such as these nice to have:

Secure, registered user only access.

Opening news/blog page with most frequent download/kb article stats, etc.

Asset libraries for self-serve documentation, video training, and software updates downloads.

Good site-wide content search. (very important)

KCS format/searchable knowledge base. (very important)

This should include customer feedback capability on KB articles (i.e. "was this helpful? "yes" or "no" - plus comment)
Customer forum.

Typical self-serve customer ticket submission and escalations with customized forms (and different forms available for different types of customers - driven by their SLA agreement levels). (very important)

Rules settings for customers with different service levels agreements.

Universal inbox (all tickets/conversations with customers) are accessible by all agents. This is especially important when an agent is unavailable to continue on an important issue with a client.

Additional considerations:

Scalable customer and team growth (current customer base is 50 and team is 5 support agents) with expected growth to 1000 customers within the next three years.

Support for mobile device viewing.

Good and established community of contributors and users, ensuring continued growth of the product.

Ability to self-host and run within a Windows or Linux VM.

Flexible ability to customize and brand the portal (I expect this is moot for open source). (very important)

Optional paid product support is nice to consider.

Case management - statistics like, view of number of unresolved tickets, length of waiting time, average waiting time, alerts when time/SLA is nearly reached, etc. (very important)

Here are some open source options that I am currently investigating (I've just begun my research today):
https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ - RT: Request Tracker
http://www.otrs.com/software/ - OTRS Free – The Flexible Open Source Service Management Software (not open source)
http://sitracker.org/ - SiT! Support Incident Tracker
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/ - Liferay Portal

Thank you for your ideas and recommendations.

Enterprise Software Web Applications Databases

Last Comment

Doug Van

3/22/2016

Pavel Celba

11/26/2015

You may look at the Trac http://trac.edgewall.org/
It is more oriented to software development but it is worth to look at. You will need some plugins to manage separate clients, e.g. https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/ClientsPlugin.

You may also isolate your clients from the ticket system and allow then just to send e-mails which are uploaded to the database.

Doug Van

11/27/2015

ASKER

Hello pcelba,

Thank you for your reply. Interesting project that I had not previously seen. Unfortunately, even with the 'hacks' wiki page add-ons, it isn't what I had in mind. Ideally, I am looking for a more all-in-one/integrated portal application... like the ones I am currently investigating.

But I am still going to look at the Trac application for engineering use. Currently we are completely relying on jira and this tool may actually enhance bug tracking. :)

Aaron Tomosky

12/2/2015

if you stick with Jira, it has a servicedesk addon. I've generally found that you go full atlassian or none for the best results.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk/

SOLUTION

David Johnson, CD

12/2/2015

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

lenamtl

12/3/2015

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Doug Van

2/5/2016

ASKER

Yikes! I've been travelling for some time. Forgot about this question. I apologize to all and also thank everyone for their suggestions. I'll review all your questions this evening.

Doug Van

2/11/2016

ASKER

Sorry (again) folks, I am still researching the suggestions but I'll likely grade this q today.

Doug Van

2/12/2016

ASKER

Sorry folks, I know I keep saying I'll grade this question but some of your suggestions (and any solution) has turned out to be more complex than I anticipated. It would be super nice if any of your suggestions completely fit my criteria but unfortunately none are "perfect", each requires a few compromises.

I have allotted the entire day to researching all your suggestions and building a weighted feature table to help me narrow down the list to a manageable few.

I'll follow up by the end of the day. Thank you again for all your suggestions. :)

Doug Van

3/22/2016

ASKER

Thank you to everyone for your assistance and patience. I really appreciate all your suggestions.

I am still evaluating the following: Spiceworks and OSIticket but I thought I should close this ticket.

A decision probably won't be made until June so in the meantime, if someone suggests a better solution, that best fits my criteria, I will be happy to open a new ticket and offer you full points.

Thanks again to all,
Shawn

Doug Van

3/22/2016

ASKER

Thanks to all but Lenamtl and David offered the best answers. :)