Simple Open Source Trouble Ticket System / Customer Support System

I was looking for a simple free & open source trouble ticket system. I checked several of them, all the popular ones and more. I scanned through all the lists, which unfortunately haven’t been updated for years. Anyway after slogging for several hours, I present you with the simplest, easy to use and well featured trouble ticket system I could find.

Note: Don’t forget to read the disclaimer section (not your standard stuff) with interesting tidbits on other trouble ticket systems.

Trouble Ticket System / Customer Support System Requirements

First let’s look at the requirements:
Most people make the mistake of thinking that a trouble ticket system is nothing but a defect tracking system and so they recommend systems like trac. Trouble ticket system, while similar in concept to defect tracking system, is significantly different in nature and purpose. A trouble ticket system is primarily concerned with accepting issues from end-users and routing them through the workflow system to get it resolved. It should also allow for escalation, if required, and prioritization.

A trouble ticket system, may (mostly for open source projects) or not allow viewing defects reported by other users. A trouble ticket system is more concerned with providing a service to get the troubles / issues resolved. It may or may not want users to view issues reported by other users. However when it doesn’t allow viewing issues by other users, it should be complemented with a FAQ system to reduce load on customer support.
A valid use case for not allowing viewing issues for other users is when you are reporting an issue to your web hosting provider. Your report may contain details of login, password or other sensitive information which you do not want other users, or worse search bots, to browse through.
Many defect tracking systems, including the one I currently use - Mantis, doesn’t allow this simple functionality out of the box!

A defect tracking system on the other hand is focussed on getting defects resolved for a product or project. It isn’t focussed as much on providing timely resolution of customer defects as it is on timely fixing of bugs. So while they are similar, they intent and purpose is different.

Simple Open Source Trouble Ticket System

Of all the products I have tested, including but not limited to RT (see disclaimer at the end of article), Trac, Mantis etc., I would recommend OneOrZero at this time. You can see the demo here.

Key Features of OneOrZero Trouble Ticket System / Customer Support System

Requirements

• Easy installation including tools to manage installation
• Easy to understand and use
• Password encryption
• Completely Scalable
• Customizable task categories
• Customizable task groups
• Customizable status list
• Customizable priority list
• Customizable severity list
• Customizable project list
• Task feedback and service level statistics
• Easy to configure security
• Simple user and group creation and maintenance
• Encryption of passwords
• Easy to add announcements/news section
• Customizable and templates
• Knowledge base that can be standalone or created as a result of tasks
• Tasks can be created by users, task managers
• Tasks can be created by email
• LDAP support
• Extensive task search options
• Extensive statistics and reporting functionality
• Task statistics and feedback report
• Attachment support
• Database consistency checker
• Task notification via email, sms and pager gateways
• Automatic user account registration
• Public or private system allowing for guest access
• Customizable url settings
• Optional integrated forum
• Optional SSL support for secure communication
• Configurable email server support
• Optional Who’s Online status
• Easy Upgrades
• Time Tracking Capabilities
• Contact Management
• Group security field value filters

Requirements

• PHP 4.0 or higher
• Web Server (IIS/Apache/other)
• MySQL v4.1+
• SMTP server for email support
• SSL for secure password transaction
• Optional Forum Software

Disclaimer
In my initial review of the screenshots and feature list of RT, I couldn’t find the simple capability to limit display of issues to only those reported by the user.

When I was evaluating a system, I knew upfront that I will have to modify it to suit my needs. So I went for open source product (not to mention that it is free).

My other hesitation with RT is that it is written in Perl. I have a personal hesitation even at the thought of having to maintain perl code for years. While I have seen some excellent object printed perl code (thanks to Steve Fischer), overall I have seen far too many spaghetti perl code to even entertain the thought of enhancing a perl based project. Having said that RT is very well documented for hackers, the best of all open source defects tracking products.

Charlie has a better review on RT, where he compares it favorably with Remedy, a BMC product.

RT for Incident Response is closer to what I was looking. However it has many artifacts from CERT which made me somewhat uncomfortable. If you have to choose a new Trouble Ticket system / Incident Tracking system, I would strongly suggest that you try out RTIR before going for anything else, even OneOrZero. It may be just what the doctor ordered for you.

Note: OSTicket website was down when I accessed it. I couldn’t find PMOS which someone recommended.

So what did I do…
In the end I realized that while OneOrZero cleanly serves my need as a trouble ticket system, I couldn’t escape the allure of being able to have an integrated view of trouble tickets as well as defects for each products. We are successfully using Mantis for several years and are very happy with it. We have lot of data already in mantis. It doesn’t serve my needs of a trouble ticket system and displays much more information than I would like for a reporter. However the problems are easy to fix. I have decided to write some php code to create a simpler interface for trouble ticketing which uses Mantis database. However this is not a solution I would recommend for everyone as Mantis doesn’t document the internals very well and doesn’t have a clean plugin system like WordPress. So I would still recommend OneOrZero as a simple and reasonably functional trouble ticketing system / customer support system (I still can’t decide which is more universally acceptable name or is it incident response system?).