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.