[consulting] Ticketing Software

[Fred Jones]

I work with a small firm and the support system they have in place is
no longer sophisticated enough for their growing needs. We are looking
for an open source ticketing system, ideally in PHP. Integration with
Drupal would be nice, but this is not a crucial need. The main issues
are:

1. Two-way Email Updates: Both the client and the staff should be able
to receive and send updates to tickets via email
2. Attachments and HTML Email: Ideally the email-based updates will
allow users to send attachments and also HTML email. Many of our
clients send HTML emails, with a bit of formatting, and so we need to
be able to see that in the tickets, ideally.
3. Clients should not be required to create user accounts and login in
order to access tickets.

I think those are the main issues.

Of course there is http://otrs.org/ but I can't readily see if they
have the 3 features (or even 2) that we want. I have used Trac and
OpenAtrium, but they both require logins. I found this
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ that has email ticket creation but I
don't know anything about it. I'm guessing http://www.zentrack.net/ is
good and I think that's what I will try next.

Basically what we *think* we want is that clients can submit our
Contact Us form or email us at support at somefirm.com and either way, a
ticket will be created in the system, we get updated via email and
then we could reply via the web site or email and either way, the
client would then be updated.

Our needs are fairly simple, beyond those mentioned. Simple status of
tickets so can close them etc.

If anyone has any suggestions, or further ideas I should be
considering, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Fred