Help Desk Software

Unfortunately software bugs are part and parcel of writing code. The bigger the project the more likely it is there are going to be bugs of some sort. I have recently fallen into the mistake of starting a fairly small project recently that has grown and grown on request of the customer. If the size of the project was apparent from the start then it would have been much more obvious that a decent design environment should have been set up from the start. Here are some that I recommend

• Version Control Programme ( Subversion )
  
• Documentation (PHPDocumentor)
• Bugzilla

and finally no matter what the size of the project a ticketing system is well worth the investment.

Especially when the investment is only a hour or so of your time. This is how long it took to set up the excellent Help Desk Software that can be found at PHP Junkyard. The programme itself is completly free

Here are some of the main features

* unlimited personalized accounts for staff

* unlimited categories

* canned responses

* file attachments

* fully-featured knowledge base (articles, categories, search,...)

* custom fields in the "Submit a ticket" form

* anti-SPAM checks when submitting a ticket

* powerful ticket search functions

* e-mail notifications of new tickets and replies

* rating of staff replies and knowledge base articles

* auto close tickets after X days

* easy-to-use web interface

* easy to translate to any language

* and many more!

On the way to finding this program I'd also tried osticket.com and troubleticketexpress.com.

osticket.com - seems like a project at a very early stage. Installing this would mean getting your hands dirty and doing lots of code writing to get it to all the things it should do.

troubleticketexpress.com - has a basic version and then seems to want to channel you to purchase addons to get to the programme to do every thing you want it to.

I'd found this programme through www.hotscripts.com.