Free or Cheap Help Desk Support Software

I’ve been focusing a bit too much on CRM and now it’s time to shift gears a bit.

I’m going to focus on the small to medium business as a one or two person IT shop can simply use Outlook and public folders to track help desk tickets and incidents.

Here are a few good (and free!) Help Desk Support Software.

OpenSource Ticket Request System

Based on the current numbers and user base, OTRS appears to be the leading ticketing system.

OTRS which stands for Open Source Ticket Request System is also known as Trouble Ticket System.

Their list of over 150 paid customers includes Nokia, Siemens, Lufthansa, Boeing, NASA Ames Research Center, Amnesty International, and Fujitsu Microelectronics America.

On the free installation side, their implementations includes companies such as Intel, Sun, GE and the American Stock Exchange, plus over 6,000 other companies.

At the time of this writing, there are over 55,000 installations in 24 languages with over 4,200 mailing list subscribers

How big was the development team for OTRS?

22 OTRS employees and an additional 20 freelancers!

This may be the Redhat of the DotCom Boom (or meltdown) a decade ago, where we saw RH spin off a free version of their OS (Centos) plus their paid Enterprise level software and support. Remember, it’s the support you are paying for.

Maian Support

Maian Support is by far the most popular for small entrepreneurs and blogs.

Their current version 1.3 was released in March 2007 and has 65,000 downloads for this version alone.

This Support Ticket software is particularly good for external customers submitting help desk or support tickets. I’ve had good experiences with this ticket system (the product I am getting support for is another story!)

Some of their options include:

• Add separate support area departments
• Add individual users to each department
• Gravnt users one of 3 permission types
• Auto cron function to close unanswered tickets after certain time
• Option for support people to contact each other via admin area
• Ability to search ticket database
• Template driven system utilizing the Savant2 template engine
• Tickets show response time between posts in days, hrs & mins
• No user login required to view or create tickets
• Adds database prefix for people with only 1 database
• Add user signatures to appear at the bottom of all tickets
• Enable/disable e-mail notification for users
• Ability for admin to go straight to ticket after log in to save time
• Administrators can view users response times at a glance
• Captcha code implementation for spam prevention
• Time offset feature
• Merge ticket to another ticket with optional notification
• Admin tools to purge old tickets/attachments older than specified time
• Permanently close tickets that visitor cannot re-open
• Knowledge Base (Optional)
• File Attachment (Optional)
• Ban filters (Optional)
• Live Support Module (Optional)
• Auto zip attachments (Optional)

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About Jimson Lee
Jimson is a freelance industry analyst, with over 25 years experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining CRMHelpDeskSoftware, he spent 4 years as a Senior Consultant at Sierra Systems Group, part of Golden Gate Capital, a leading private equity firm with $9 billion in capital under management. Jimson currently resides in Rome, Italy.