I've recently taken over the running af a companies IT dept. Currently there is no trouble ticket tracking system. i'm looking for the best and easiet to use open source system available. anyone got any recommendations. here are the specifics. I've got an older IBM P4 server with an 80GB HD running Ubuntu. I want to by the end of theweek start implimentation of some type of system as i've been nundated with trouble calls and projects. Please anyone who's got some direct experiance let me know what you use and what you think and what's the best and easiest to impliment. It would also be cool if it could handle asset tracking but thats a wishlist item.

Thanks in advance
Beer

A couple of months ago my boss here asked a similar question with an eye to replacing our commercial application. I'd asked and this is the reply I ended up sending her after getting responses:

Three recommended Request Tracker (called RT).
http://bestpractical.com/rt/

A couple mentioned SugarCRM which has a demo for support role on this page – one said they are using it and it is a good tool:
http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/demo/sugar-suite.html

That person who is using SugarCRM said they had investigateted Jira and he thought it had some great features as well:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/


Another mentioned Eventum (saying they were actually using it themselves):
http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Another mentioned OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) and recommended it as a good choice being all open source and that “it works’:
http://otrs.org/

One mentioned Bugzilla but as I noted this morning that seems to me to be a development tool for bug tracking. It has a features page at:
http://www.bugzilla.org/features/

One person suggested doing Google search for “site:freshmeat.net help desk” (without the quotes). This pulled up several different help desk software packages. Search URL I got on doing this was:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...+desk&aq=f&oq=

Ultimately we never proceeded even to evaluation as they chose to keep the existing commercial one so I'm not recommending (or panning) any of the above myself - just providing it as a shortcut since it was where I would have started had they not kept the commercial one.

Over the years I've had good experience with Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org). It uses a data base managements system, MySQL by default, to store all bug reports and responses to them, supports extensive reporting, group assignments, automatic "tickling" (it mails a tickle note to folks if a bug remains open for a given amount of time) and has many useful features. Don't be put off by the name or the word "bug;" troubles are trouble by any other name.

I can say that, over roughly six years of use there has never been a crash (with about 200 users), upgrades are smooth and generally automatic (that's darned nice, believe me). The learning curve isn't all that steep. It's a web interface, so no software gets installed on anything but the server. And, last but not least, there just isn't all that much administration that needs doing -- install it, configure it, and leave it to mumble to itself (users set up their own accounts via e-mail).

Worth a good hard look.

Right but is Bugzilla really useful for help desk type of tickets that aren't "bugs" but general issues? From what I read it seems like its main focus is bug tracking and might not be easily adaptable to a more general help desk kind of role. Haven't used it so I could be dead wrong.

It's used for all kinds of things -- a "bug" is just a "trouble ticket" by another name. Reported by an individual, automagically assigned to one or more folks for "fixing" (with copies to appropriate others if wanted), a "fix" is reported by the "fixer" and the original reporter closes the ticket if all is well with the world. There are a large number of developers that use Bugzilla for keeping track of changes to programs and the like but there are also a large number that use it as a trouble ticket reporting system. The beauty of the thing is that you can -- without a lot of fooling around -- use it for whatever purpose you need to; you define "products" and "classifications" to meet your needs (and, sure, you can share actual products with, say, a bunch of desktops being supported).

It's a good system used by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Not fancy, just usable (and, again, it's web-based, no software installed anywhere but the server).

Just a thought.

well I've done some looking and it looks to me that bugtracker doesn't exactly fit thought i see how it could be used for this. OTRS looked good but i don't like the interface, sugarcrm and eventum are both purchasable which counts them out immediately. these are the ones i've found and i'm wondering if anyone's got any input on them?

http://www.oneorzero.com
http://www.zentrack.net - this is the one i'm leaning towards but it looks tough to install, especially the smtp stuff.
http://www.vtiger.com

I appreciate all the response though. i'm familiar with Ilient, so i'm kind of looking for something similar to that.