I'm looking for a trouble ticket system so that I can track issues for various customers. I used one before at my previous employer but it wasn't anything too great. I'm wondering which ones you would recommend and what other features that I might want to look at to make my job easier. It must posses the following.
Commercial Products:
Open Source:
I would suggest Request Tracker (RT) with the AssetTracker plugin.
We use FogBugz for bug tracking, but it's expensive ($100 per developer) and depending on how you feel, the interface is so-so.
We also use Trac for internal help desk ticketing; depending on how you feel, the interface is worse, but it's much cheaper. You have to run your own server with Python though.
And you can also use 37Signals's HighRise, which I've heard some people have had some success turning into a helpdesk system. It'll keep track of all your correspondence and attachments. But using it will involve tweaking your notions of a help ticket system, which in some ways is a good thing.
Trellis Deskby Accord5 is open-source and freeware
I have been using [AdventNet ServiceDesk plus][1] for years, love it. It's a all-in-one web-based product, including ticket system, asset management, knowledge base, purchase, contract management, etc. Very easy to install on both Linux and Windows platform. Straightforward to use as well.
They actually have various products that you may find interesting. And best, most of their products have the free version that you can use free forever. Better check it out.
Cheers, Kent
[1]: as a new user, I can't post an url for the product (quite dumb IMHO), but you can easily Google it.
We are using Lighthouse - lighthouseapp.com which is a hosted, commercial product. Rather simple to use, not overloaded with a million fields, good email integration, essentially free for open-source projects.
get a cms like joomla or drupal and add a ticket plugin, there is a bunch and most of them free so you should try at least a couple.
For ticketing system I've used and recommend cerberus but I don't think it does asset management.
www.cerberusweb.com
OTRS is a little cumbersome, but I like it well enough.
RT is the Commonly held best. It's very big and very configurable. Not really one for small jobs, but perfect if you need something really big and robust. It also integrates well with ldap, and that's a plus.
Gnats is a granddaddy product that some people swear by. I find it to feel as old as it is. I wouldn't recommend it unless all the users were techies, since it's not pretty and not very user friendly. That being said, I hear it's quite easy to set up.
I use connexit, works rather well, though a bit pricy.
If you are looking for a more IT related solution, as opposed to bug tracking, then I cannot recommend AutoTask enough. It has everything that you need and more, without being cumbersome to setup or maintain.
Key Features:
We've been using it for 2-3 years, and we'd be lost without it. The only issue we had was tax rates on invoices - the company is American, and we are in Canada and have different legal requirements for listing taxes. The support folks bent over backwards to come up with a fix for us, which was also great.
Jira works well enough as a bug tracker, but is far from ideal as a general purpose ticket tracker tool. Also, I didn't find any decent asset tracking support when I used it at my previous job.
Confluence is an acceptable Wiki, although I don't care for their attempts at forcing it into a hierarchy. The tie-in between Jira and Confluence isn't bad.
– Christopher Cashell Dec 28 '09 at 21:45