Can you suggest a software solution please?
 

I am in search of a web-based "trouble-ticket" application for use in a small computer repair shop. I want something to run from our intranet to keep a progress log of each computer we service. I envision something that could keep a database of customers, where we can add repair tickets with details about the repairs. Those tickets could be updated as we service the machine with repair info and communication to/from the customer. By the end of the repair, we could have a detailed report of everything we did.

I browsed through the "Project Management" category on sourceforge.net and quickly felt overwhelmed with the amount of powerful tools available. I don't need something complex like Redmine, dotProject or PHPCollab.

Ideally it would meet many or all of these criteria:

• Free (GPL)
• Lightweight (geared toward small enterprises/projects)
• web-based (PHP/MySQL preferred)
• Simple (I don't need lots of features)

Notes: I believe this is on-topic for this forum because I want to run it from my LAMP server. I imagine there are many sysadmins here who may be able to provide suggestions. I apologize if this is offtopic. Thank you all in advance for your time.

There's a multitude of them, they all seem (to me) to have issues that require customization, but if memory serves me OTRS was one of the better ones and has a feature set you could work with. I've also found it useful to integrate a collaboration and scheduling tool like egroupware into the system as well (otrs has one already built in, but I don't remember why it wasn't usable the way we wanted now.)

It is tricky to get you a useful but lightweight solution from anything open source or free software because, if a program is useful it gets added to. So a simple project tends to grow rather fast until it is no longer simple.

The usual approach is to start with something over-featured and just use what you need. This is OK because you are not paying high license fees on the unused functionality.


this review for RT which sounds like exactly what you want. You'll probably find it in your distro repos.

Also look at OTRS as a comparison.

I think Trac could fit the bill, but its python based. It isn't designed to be used in this way, but I think you could without any problem.

Thank you all! It looks like RT or OTRS both come much closer to what I want than the likes of Redmine, et. al. I also understand that free software requires tailoring, or else the only other option is coding from scratch.