On 21/12/10 08:51, Simon Elliott wrote:

We use Spiceworks at work. http://www.spiceworks.com/ It offers a helpdesk system which does hook into email, we use a generic helpdesk@ mailbox but the system forwards new tickets to our own addresses if we want it to - Spiceworks also offers a "user portal" so the user can log in to that to view their currently open tickets on a web-based system which sounds better for your high-volume client. The system allows allocating tickets to particular people etc. It also allows closing/updating of tickets directly from the automated email system, e.g. I can reply to an email with #close and a message which will close the ticket and push a message back to the user through the helpdesk@ mailbox. In Spiceworks you can also allocate time spent on each ticket and thus money charged in the latest version. It's got a good purchase tracking system also if you need to buy something to complete a particular ticket.

And it's open source!! Maybe it's more what you're looking for - maybe not. Just my 2p.

That all sounds about perfect, thanks for the suggestion! The only downside is that it seems to require a Windows host. I might experiment anyway (I wonder if it works under Wine?). But I had assumed that I'd be using something which sits out of the office on a virtual server somewhere so that everyone (eg customers) can access it without me opening up the office connection, but for that to work it would need to be Linux based. Worth a look though. Thanks! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

Simon Elliott wrote:

On 20 December 2010 13:59, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote:

...

I've installed RT to be used for managing incoming support emails. Having got it installed and "working" I'm finding it very hard to work out what to do next in terms of actually using it. (Eg I created myself a user, but can't see how to let that user see incoming emails, although I can see them fine logged in as root.)

Are there any good guides to using RT around? Google has let me down so far, and the RT wiki seems a bit to broad to get me started.

Where I need to get to pretty quickly is having a number of users, any of whom can take a ticket and work with it, or allocate it to another user where necessary. I also need to manage the email process (I have one particular client I want to push in this direction, but to do that I need to make sure they don't get most of the automated emails otherwise they'll be swamped as they send us probably 200 emails a week that will become separate tickets once I get this working).

We use Spiceworks at work. http://www.spiceworks.com/ It offers a

[SNIP] FWIW, we used that because a client did, and we all hated it. Also, it is impossible to get them to stop send marketing and "informative" emails. I wouldn't go near Spiceworks with a barge pole. IMO... Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------

On 21/12/10 13:29, Rob Snow wrote:

You might want to take a peek at GLPI (I shudder at the thought of including a link, as every-time I add a link my message gets rejected)

so try Googling glpi-project dot org

Not sure why you have problems with links (like http://www.glpi-project.org - maybe your mail client switches to HTML email as soon as you add a link?) but thanks for the pointer anyway. I have looked at the GLPI website before but it seems more biased to asset tracking than issue tracking. Do you have experience with it? Would it suit me as a method of handling incoming support emails, and making sure each one gets actioned? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

On 22/12/10 11:06, Rob Snow wrote:

IMHO Glpi is a great issue tracker - we have it picking up emails from an (yuk) exchange mailbox, and users also submit requests via a web page. GLPI keeps them informed every time we do something to their ticket ( if we want them to know).

That all sounds promising, worth a look.

Every day I find more ways for it to make my life easier. We support about 200 users here and even they took to it like the proverbial ducks to water. We only needed to show our most "challenging" users the basics - everyone else just accepted it and ran with it!

That's pretty impressive, most of my attempts so far have been more like duck to Chinese restaurant! I also like the fact that (IIRC) GLPI is PHP based so it falls into my skillset rather than relying on things "just working" like some of the others do. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

Wayne Stallwood wrote:

On 21/12/10 14:32, Mark Rogers wrote:

...

I have looked at the GLPI website before but it seems more biased to asset tracking than issue tracking. Do you have experience with it? Would it suit me as a method of handling incoming support emails, and making sure each one gets actioned?

Sorry for adding another thing to look at but we use OTRS at work http://otrs.org/

I have never got round to fine tuning it to fix the behaviour of a few things that annoy us but we use it for support emails and support call management for a number of products and it works pretty well and is easy to get going out of the box.

I did look at RT first but it seemed a bit less usable out of the box, although possibly more flexible once you got it working. One thing OTRS does do quite well is manage service contracts so there is a calendar where you can mark a contract renewal date and it will flag any service tickets for that customer if they are out of contract. This and the ability to add scheduled tickets for routine service was something that was important to us, but maybe not so relevant in your case. It also allows you to feed in support hours for a ticket resolution or at each point in the case notes and then produce a report that does hours to ticket or hours to customer which again is handy for billing.

We use RT mainly because it was essentially all that was about 10 years ago when we started working that way. We are now a long way behind the latest-version-curve, and updating RT is a royal pain. We think we will take the opportunity to use another, simpler tool, more in tune with our needs. RT is extensive and extensible, but far too complex for a simple helpdesk. With RT, we like the idea of a queue per client or function, and we have written reporting tools to assist billing and stats. From your comment above, it sounds as if OTRS will provide the latter, but does it use queues, or have some similar functionality? There's a Turnkey Linux VB image for this, which I think we'll play with, but I'd appreciate a brief synopsis if you have the time, please. I've already looked at GLPI, but I agree with you, and asset tracking isn't the core we need, helpdesk is. Cheers, Laurie. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------

On 21/12/10 12:55, Martyn Drake wrote:

Create a queue (support, admin, etc.) and add users to that queue? Then when you email that queue all users in that queue should see the same email?

I'll have another look at this, but this all seemed quite convoluted. <later> OK, I've created a group and added lots of rights to it for my main support queue (no idea what half of them do!) and added my user to the group, and I can see stuff in the queue. I can see how to "Take" a ticket, although no idea how I might allocate it to someone else. Also, what I will almost certainly need to do is to have mail from certain email addresses automatically go into certain queues regardless of the address they were sent to, I assume that's possible somewhere? I have to say that RT just feels very much like hard work, although I appreciate that a lot of people use it so it must be doing something right. (Could use the same argument for Windows mind you....) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG