suggestions of Helpdesk software, request tracking - public domain or low cost

Tue Jul 11 11:35:17 PDT 2006

Guy B. Purcell wrote:
> * Remedy's ARS--this is the engine beneath Remedy's own helpdesk app; 
> it's not cheap, but it has several nice features (my favorite was the 
> ability to put tickets "on the back burner" for a time & have 'em 
> automatically "reactivate" when that time had lapsed--really nice for 
> when, say, a customer says they'll get back to you within X days); and 
> their actual helpdesk app is very expensive

Actually, _I_ added that, and called it "freeze until" -- very useful 
for things like "expect a package on $date" or "call this guy back if he 
doesn't call by $date".  For such tickets there is nothing more to do 
but wait (just not forever), so it might as well vanish from the "to do" 
list for a while.  I miss this feature a lot.

It did use an underlying Remedy ARS feature that could notice the 
passage of time and do things.  ARS was a serious chunk of change, and 
it's still only a substrate: You will still spend several months 
customizing it.  But you end up much further along than if you wrote 
something from scratch for those same months.  I was a fairly happy 
customer.  This was in about 1995-97.

Since then my money doesn't run to ARS and I'm using RT.  Sadly, it 
lacks reporting[1], its "Scrips" engine is not _quite_ easy enough to 
figure out (I tried, and timed out), and the basic priority scheme needs 
far too much work to be realistic.  (If the top-priority thing in your 
queue is not what you end up working on, ask yourself, Why not?)  Not 
only do I not have the money this time, I don't have three months to 
give to the customization of things like that.

[1] RT, like many of these things, suffers from possibly the worst idea 
the 20th century gave us, namely Self-service, or, make the customer do 
all the work.  If it's mathematically possible for the customer to 
extend the product, no matter the effort required, then the engineers 
don't feel the need to build in even sensible starting points. 
Reporting?  Why, it's all sitting there in MySQL!