[consulting] Ticketing Software

[Christian Pearce]

Hi Fred, 


We use RT. It is written in Perl. I know Perl from years back. You can customize it at a lot of different levels. For example it has a custom fields configuration that you can apply to tickets, transactions, queues, etc (think CCK). We have written custom plugins and integrated it into our accounting system, Adempiere. A process we are continuing to mold an shape as we grow and scale. We have separate schema's in our posgresql database. We wrote a JAVA process into Adempiere to pull in our tickets per customer into invoices for automated billing. 


It is a swiss army knife when it comes to a ticketing system. You can easily do number 1. You either comment on a ticket which is an internal dialog that doesn't get sent to the customer, or replies which is correspondence with the customer. Number 2 works, but we disabled HTML. We were building reports from the transactions with time on it for our customers in Jasper. Having some with and without HTML made the reports look like garbage. Something that COULD be fixed, but we took the easy approach. Attachments we use quite frequently. As far as number 3. They can create tickets without logging in. They can correspond via email. But if you want them to log in then need a username and password. I could foersee being able to write software that lets people click a link to login as themselves. But the security ramifications would need to be thought through. 


I can't say I love RT. I love what we have done with it to make our business run smoother. At this point I learned the system and know how to make it do what I want to do. But it isn't a quite and easy setup. You do need to customize it to your needs. 


Talk to me offline if you are interested in having me do a crash course or setup for you. 

----- "Fred Jones" <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote: 
> From: "Fred Jones" <fredthejonester at gmail.com> 
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers" <consulting at drupal.org> 
> Sent: Monday, December 12, 2011 2:23:37 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
> Subject: [consulting] Ticketing Software 
> 
> 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 
> _______________________________________________ 
> consulting mailing list 
> consulting at drupal.org 
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> 

-- 

xforty technologies 
Christian Pearce 
888-231-9331 x1119 
http://xforty.com 
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