Which is the best free helpesk software

[Yahoo]

Friends,

Which is the best free helpesk software

thanks in advance ...

[bj-kaiser]

define a bit more what you want, case tracking and such or remote control or IT resource management.

[CoffeeFiend]

As bj-kaiser said, perhaps you need to be a bit more specific.

Just a ticket management solution?

If that's the case, then it's very hard to say. I've tried countless such apps a while ago, including several commercial ones. More or less, they all sucked. Some were plain ghetto. Others had the very worst GUI I had ever seen (when a whole IT team sees it as the worst WTF ever, you have a problem -- a half dozen frames in a web page, each with 2 scroll bars...) Some were very buggy. Others were missing basic features. Others were just backwards or counter-intuitive. Some were a nightmare to customize the least bit. Some had licensing we didn't care for. Some had weird system requirements. You could have nightmares looking at the code of a few (just plain bad stuff, buggy, insecure and all). Some web-based ones weren't anywhere near cross-browser (IE + ActiveX only anyone?) You name it, I've seen it.

You'll need to make a little analysis of what you need. Does it have to run on a specific platform? Are there any type of things it must do? Do it have to be ITIL compliant? Tons of questions to ask yourself.

And Must it absolutely be free? I mean, if you're going to have a help desk, you need to provide them with office space (that ain't free), hire some people (not free either last I heard), get some office furniture, phone lines, etc. It's a pretty expensive thing overall, I don't see the price of most commercial ticket management apps making much of a difference when you look at the big picture. Especially if it makes them more efficient or such - it could end up being effectively cheaper than free if it's a really good fit.

If it must be free, then do like I did a few months ago and hit sourceforge. Download dozens and dozens of apps. Waste time trying to install them, configuring them, getting them to work (expect lots of glitches and little problems), lots of system requirements to take care of (different databases to setup and what not). Only to find out that 99% of them are really bad. Costs nothing in licensing, but it'll sure cost you a LOT in wasted hours.

We ended up replacing our old app (classic ASP from back in the NT4 days or so) with a new home made ASP.NET (C#, .NET 2.0) app which was really great. Did everything we needed and more. We were quite happy with it. Until the day some manager heard about ITIL and "drank the kool-aid". How ITIL was best practice, so it would make everything so much better and also cure cancer. So eventually we were forced to move to a totally wretched system instead: Remedy. Service has anything but improved... Heavy bureaucracy moved in, support calls can now take far longer, everyone hates the system in general - all of it (and the asset management part is so sub-standard it's practically useless).

Personally, if I was going to make a choice, I'd go for Web Help Desk. That's the best I've seen so far. The only thing I don't really like is the price, but then again, setting up a help desk is already a big expense. Not pocket change, but not so much when you look at the big picture. There's a few other decent commercial ones, but as for free apps, I have yet to see one that doesn't suck (haven't tried them all though, and your needs might be different). The other option is to make one yourself, if you have the time and expertize - and pray no manager ends up forcing you to replace it with remedy!