Brian Densmore wrote:

...

-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Hutchins

Patric, you give some details on things like how you want buttons to respond, but no overview on what you're tracking.

You say you have 400 clients and are tracking "system problems" and "customer complaints".

What service are you providing? Are you supporting a software product? Are you the help desk for a corporation, handling all support for diverse departments?

...

What do you hope to get OUT of the tracking system? Do you ...

I'm not sure why what his service is, is relevant to choosing a help ticket tracking system. We know from his email he doesn't want one geared only for hardware. So this would tend to lean toward a more generalized system requirement. The things he didn't make clear were the types of features he wants in such a system. Such as should the ticket system allow clients to log in and post tickets, or will all tickets be created from the support desk? Will clients be able to look up the status and history of their help tickets?

Its possible as our customers become more tech savvy, but as of right now we phone based and thinking along those lines. This could be a break for us to take another step into the new century. We have been making upgrades, but some mindset still keeps our staff thinking that people would rather talk on the phone or are lazy and don't want to type.

Thats because our business is phones and we are afraid to say there is other stuff out there. Since we are phone based most of our clients think that way too. I think some people are lazy and would be O.K. with typing rather than only calling.

What types of information needs to be tracked? Reporting? Summarizations? Searchability? A simple solution that just tracks and assigns help tickets that doesn't need reporting or any fancy stuff would hardly be worth paying big bucks for when a simple freeware version should do all that is needed.

Some of these GPL systems seem to be pretty feature rich, its just how well to they function. Are they buggy? Easy to use? I doubt the free ones are designed to send out pages, but you never know unless you look deeper they often just list reporting, emailing, and prioritization.

But if a Ticket system needs to have all the bells and whistles, then it might be time to consider shelling out some bucks. Personally I can't see paying for a help ticket system. Like Jonathon says, a quick and dirty MySQL db based system should be all anyone needs, and functionality can always be added as needed.

If all I wanted was a ticket number and fill in the blanks with information, and add/update information as we work on a problem, I could probably eventually create something. Our phone system has a Custom/open FrontPage based scripting package. That uses MSsql and will supposedly work with other sql servers.