[nmglug] open source help desk software

[Gary Sandine]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:25:27PM -0700, Nick Frost wrote:
> In my experience people (users) are too lazy to fill out tickets,
> causing the support staff to frequently and retroactively create
> the  tickets and annotate them, which actually adds up when we're
> talking  20-40 tickets per day for the average small organization.
> The refusal  of people to use the system once deployed is very
> annoying.  Documenting the workload with a ticketing system is
> important in  justifying the workload to management.  It's not
> quite as bad when  people can email help at organization.org with
> their support request (for  some reason some people can send off
> an email but balk at filling out  a ticket on a web page) and the
> email feature of Web Help Desk helps  alleviate (somewhat) the
> need to retroactively create tickets for lazy  users.

I agree, and that's one of the things I like about RT.  Users can
send e-mail to "help at whatever.com" and they don't even have to know
about tickets unless they want to.  Replies go back to the ticket
and to everyone who needs to know, etc.  Staff can interact with
tickets (note time, assign tickets, close tickets, comment on
tickets, add Cc or correspondents, whatever...) by putting commands
in the e-mail body which RT strips out before sending your reply to
the requester, if applicable.

I have been a support person using a ticket system, and I generally
don't like Web interfaces either when I can just do everything I
need to through e-mail.  That's certainly the only way to get users
to do it (unless Web interface is the only option and asking for
help any other way results in no help :) ).

-- 
Gary Sandine <gars at laclinux.com>