We have been doing a lot of research into trying to find a help desk application that would take any incoming e-mail or web form communications and create a support ticket. It is very important that a customer be able to e-mail us from their normal e-mail client(Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc). When this e-mail is received it should be added to the Help Desk Application database and be seen by our technicians as a new support ticket. Also, our technicians should be able to check tickets and use the Help Desk app via any web browser.

So far we have found DeskPro, TicketSmith, SalesLogix, and Heat/Power Desk meet our requirements(some betters than others). We are looking to spend no more than $1000.

Does anyone have any other recommendations? Anyone have experience with any of the above named apps? All recommendations and comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Perldesk

I've installed it on my site and 2 other web hosting companies as well. It's VERY feature packed.

Oh and the price is right at $0 and it supports everything you mentioned and a lot more.

www.perldesk.com

send $500 to perldesk developer :D

i would recommend deskpro, we use it and it is an excellent product. just do a search on "deskpro" to see all the positive reviews.

I second the Perldesk recommendation, however as it is written in CGI I had some trouble getting it to work correctly on my RAQ.

Personally, I recommend DeskPro or PerlDesk. Both are great products.

Originally posted by ASPCode.net
I second the Perldesk recommendation, however as it is written in CGI[clip]
It's written in Perl, and runs on your web server using the Common Gateway Interface specification.

There is no language called CGI. It's an interface specification.

That's like saying it's written in TCP/IP or HTTP :).

Not picking nits, but picking nonetheless :).

-t

Originally posted by thewitt

It's written in Perl, and runs on your web server using the Common Gateway Interface specification.

There is no language called CGI. It's an interface specification.

That's like saying it's written in TCP/IP or HTTP :).

Not picking nits, but picking nonetheless :).

-t

Sure I know that. I am a developer myself. Just my lousy english and being that tired we usually get on a friday :)

Common Gateway Interface
CGI

Hmm i pick CGI much shorter.. hehe

All the same darn thing in the end to me..

i recommend www.deskpro.com i went live with it on my site today but have been getting a feel of it for weeks :)

they have an affiliate program so you can recoup some of your costs

CGI and Perl DO go hand in hand since the two are most commonly applied to one and other... but technically CGI isn't a language :). But who cares really, I figure we all know what he meant ;).

I would try eSupport, I use it and it works great. http://www.kayako.com

Hi,

I would say www.perldesk.com - this is what we are installing. PerlDesk looks like a very nice Ticket System. My thoughts...hope they help.

jslivko,

I have narrowed down my choices to either DeskPRO or esupport. I was wondering if esupport allows the customer interface to be customized/changed and if yes how easy is it to customize? I went to your support page http://www.voyageri.net/support/ and see that this page is exactly the same as the demo on kayako.com. Do you plan on modifying this page? Any reason that you have not done so yet? I would really like to be able to customize this page.

Also, when looking at the demo it looks as though the View Tickets page doesn't list ownership of the ticket. Is this true or am I overlooking something?

How was the installation process, any problems?

Thanks

<edit>

PS: Mods I think I can reply to this thread as he was referring to eSupport directly but if you have any objections you can remove this post and I will contact the user directly.

<<MOD NOTE:>>
It would be better if you emailed directly and possibly clarified things on your site (if needed).
<</MOD NOTE>>

Originally posted by BMM
jslivko,

I have narrowed down my choices to either DeskPRO or esupport. I was wondering if esupport allows the customer interface to be customized/changed and if yes how easy is it to customize? I went to your support page http://www.voyageri.net/support/ and see that this page is exactly the same as the demo on kayako.com. Do you plan on modifying this page? Any reason that you have not done so yet? I would really like to be able to customize this page.

Also, when looking at the demo it looks as though the View Tickets page doesn't list ownership of the ticket. Is this true or am I overlooking something?

How was the installation process, any problems?

Thanks

That is correct, I haven't had the time to change it, but plan to soon. As for the installation, it was a breeze (aside from getting PHP to work nicely with Zend, etc. but thats a different story).

Originally posted by Varun Shoor
BMM,
Apparently from what we studied during our research on other support softwares was that one had to take the "ownership" of tickets to process them, but eSupport follows a completely different path, here people assigned to a department can answer "any" tickets, but to point some specific tickets to certain users we added the ability to flag them. This shows a small Icon with some notes beside the ticket so a person knows what to do and when.

Varun Shoor,

OK this clears it up a little. I guess what I am looking for is an ownership column that when looking at all the open tickets, it clearly shows who has ownership of the ticket. For example, we have 4 technicians and tech1 logins and looks at all of the open tikets and wants to see which tickets tech3 owns because tech3 has called in sick for the day.

Or in another case tech1 views all the open tickets and sees that many tickets have been read but not replied to and is wondering who has ownership of these tickets and has failed to reply to them even though they have read them.

Does esupport have this functionality?

BMM,
Currently no, but eSupport features a Last reply column and Total Replies column which shows the tickets that are "new", so if your tickets show that the last reply was from "customer" then it means that the customer has replied and you need to reply back, otherwise it will show the name of the tech that has replied to a ticket.

So when tech1 logs in, he will see the new tickets (with red folder) and if he sees that the last replier was tech3 then that means the ticket has been answered and if the last replier was customer then that means the ticket has a new reply, he can also check the Replies column to see if a ticket has 0 replies.

Please check our demo to see this in working.

Regards,

Varun Shoor

Originally posted by BMM


Varun Shoor,

OK this clears it up a little. I guess what I am looking for is an ownership column that when looking at all the open tickets, it clearly shows who has ownership of the ticket. For example, we have 4 technicians and tech1 logins and looks at all of the open tikets and wants to see which tickets tech3 owns because tech3 has called in sick for the day.

Or in another case tech1 views all the open tickets and sees that many tickets have been read but not replied to and is wondering who has ownership of these tickets and has failed to reply to them even though they have read them.

Does esupport have this functionality? deskpro has that in the form on search tickets with drop down menu listing all techs and unassigned tickets as well

Originally posted by thewitt

It's written in Perl, and runs on your web server using the Common Gateway Interface specification.

There is no language called CGI. It's an interface specification.

That's like saying it's written in TCP/IP or HTTP :).

Not picking nits, but picking nonetheless :).

-t


CGI only has a few languages under it and the most common one is Perl, so Perl is usually intermixed as CGI. Thats why people say CGI usually.

http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/ (see, most are written in perl)

I just looked at two of my servers, and since I don't run mod_php, all my PHP scripts are run as CGI, and I have more C CGI applications than Perl CGI applications...

It's not too much to ask for people to use words that actually mean what they expect them to mean, if they are to be understood.

-t