Looking for a helpdesk system

[heldercervantes]

I'm going to relate this to PW, promise.

I'm looking for a cool, simple, free helpdesk system. Nothing too fancy, just letting users in, post a ticket, get replies, talk back, close ticket, reopen ticket, close again. See a list of what was requested, what's open, what's done.

Anyone got suggestions? I can only find paid or crap solutions. No middle ground.

Now the link to PW:

As a way to promote PW, would it be a good idea if we had projects, like a ticket system, free and based on PW? You'll all probably agree it would be relatively easy to pull off a ticket system in PW. I'm imagining something styled by the theme system (I love Reno), using an installation profile to setup, the roles system that's already there, and sold as "the free, processwire powered helpdesk system".

Devs need ticket systems and like me want to avoid spending a dime. They find this and try it out. It's cool. Let's have a look at PW since we're here. Whoa this is awesome! And my clients will see the same beautiful, tidy interface on their CMS? Screw you WP, I'm going PW from now on!

Does this sound like a good idea or am I just trippin?

[adrian]

I floated the idea of a "Notes" panel for Tracy which I think would cover your needs. Have a read through many of the posts below - @bernhard and @szabesz in particular come up with some good ideas of how this might work. As @tpr suggests, Tracy may not be the place for it, but I am still considering the where and how, but I am definitely keen on building this. The key thing I want is to be able to provide and view the feedback on each page in the front-end, as well as having an admin interface to review and manage them all.

 

 

[pwFoo]

PW ticket system or simple project / task management would be nice...

[bernhard]

creating something cool is the one thing, keeping it up to date is the other... that's the more challenging part. you would have to make sure that all installations of your system can get updated if the user decides to. that's a pain with site profiles.

so i agree it would be cool to have simple project/task/ticket management in pw but i think the only possible way would be to develop a module. installable, updateable, maintainable...

gitlab has recently announced their new issue board. that looks really nice from what i saw on the video: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/22/announcing-the-gitlab-issue-board/

 

[bernhard]

ok throwing in some more ideas here as i think it would really be great to have something like this. i think the priority should be to help US at our work with our clients and not to develop something that spreads the word about processwire...

imho the most important parts would be

• feedbackform directly on the page where the issue occurs (i always have to teach my clients that they send me the URL with every request they are sending). like in my post in tracy (see below)
• copy&paste screenshots would be awesome: https://github.com/vladmalik/pasteimage
• simple overview system both for clients and for devs
• simple notification system

i'm really short on time but would help as much as i can if something like this would arise. i'm also willing to sponsor some euros for such a project  

[heldercervantes]

@bernhard good point there, about keeping it up to date.

Gitlab looks cool, but a lot like Trello and something teams would use internally, rather then a doorway for client support.

Here's a tease 

 

[bernhard]

5 minutes ago, heldercervantes said:

Gitlab looks cool, but a lot like Trello and something teams would use internally, rather then a doorway for client support.

jep, i think you are right with this

[heldercervantes]

I agree, the focus must be to make something we'd be comfortable using, rather than promoting PW.

In my case, I have two clients for whom I manage their websites. Everyday I get multiple people sending emails "change this", "add this news piece", "change the price of this car", "make me a feature promoting this". So just the ability to have them adding tickets, attaching files, have comments back and forth and see what's open or closed would be awesome.

[bernhard]

same here

[adrian]

11 minutes ago, heldercervantes said:

@bernhard good point there, about keeping it up to date.

Gitlab looks cool, but a lot like Trello and something teams would use internally, rather then a doorway for client support.

Here's a tease 

I like where you are headed and as I mentioned I am very keen on this functionality as well. I just want to make sure there won't be duplication of effort here. Are you actually starting to build this, or just trying to motivate?

[renobird]

I haven't really read all of this thread, but just wanted to chime in with a brief overview of a help desk system I built.

I can only show you screen shots from the test server — since the real one has sensitive data — but I think you get the idea.
Unfortunately it's all pretty specific to our environment here, and was never intended to be released. 

Ticket List
This is pretty small in the test environment. The lighting bolt icons open a modal that shows some "quick look" information for admins.
Last comment, ticket history, etc... It's just a way to quickly peek into a ticket without opening it.

 

Ticket View
Many of these test tickets are filled with a ton of content, but here's one that shows some of the features.
It's conversation based. You can attach specific equipment (we have several equipment databases managed in other PW modules). You can add files/images to any reply. Typical help desk stuff really. 

 

Reply options 
This is at the bottom of the discussion, a lot like it is here in the discussion forum. Agents can reply or create an internal note.

 

[flydev]

crazy 

[adrian]

Looks really great @renobird - I know you say it it is specific to your environment and not meant to be released, but are you rethinking that?

The one thing that we discussed in the Tracy thread about this was the ability for the tickets to be initiated from a link on every page so the user doesn't need to specify the page, and also so that the devs can view tickets relevant to the page they are viewing.

I'd hate to see us all reinventing the wheel here - how can we move forward?

[heldercervantes]

OMG Reno that looks exactly like what I was asking for. Admit it man, you just slapped that together, just cause you can.

Now the question is, how many beers will we have to buy you to get that code? 

[LostKobrakai]

I'm always amazed by the interfaces you implement in the pw admin @renobird. It's crazy.

[renobird]

Thanks all. There's really a lot wrapped into this. It connects to a lot more than I'm showing here. The test server doesn't show the other kinds of help desks we have. This one is the IT version, but there are 2 other variants of this system, one of which is for marketing (which has a bunch of additional fields when you complete a ticket). The original tickets are powered by FormBuilder. That way there can be all these ticket variants without having to create or try and reuse a bunch of fields.

Once the ticket is created, it's sent to a PW page. The Formbuilder JSON (and the JSON for the actual Form) are saved to the page. This way, if the form fields ever change, it doesn't effect old tickets. Essentially the state of the form and the entry are snapshot together and attached to the page.

The replies/internal notes are an extended version of the comments field so that everything is contained within a single page. It doesn't have to be that way, but I had already created this modified comments field for another project, so it was the easiest way to go with this project. 

Anyhow, It's not something I intend on releasing at this time, but may revisit it eventually if there's enough interest.
I would remove the FormBuilder dependency if I made it public. 

[Mike Rockett]

This looks awesome Tom! Finding a decent helpdesk package these days is qiute tedious. There are some good options, but no free ones for the smaller folks. Really nice to see this kind of thing wrapped up in PW.

[renobird]

Quote

Finding a decent helpdesk package these days is qiute tedious.

This is pretty much why I built one instead. We did some test runs with a few 3rd party options, and they were either WAY too bloated, or just felt ancient. There was one (the name I can't remember) that was pretty good, but it was SaaS and we couldn't integrate all our other systems. 

[bernhard]

i recently found one very nice solution that would even be free for 1 "operator" and that has an API and is abased on PHP & MySQL so it should perfectly fit with processwire: https://www.livezilla.net/features/en/

so we would have a live-chat AND helpdesk in one place. and it should be quite easy do create a processwire module that creates a widget on our clients sites where they can report issues in the way WE want (with custom forms and the info we need). it would just have to create a ticket via the api and we could manage all the tickets in one place for all our customers.

 

i didn't try it until now, but if anybody wants to give it a try i would be interested in the results

[pwired]

Quote

Finding a decent helpdesk package these days is qiute tedious.

http://blog.capterra.com/the-7-best-free-help-desk-software-tools/

[cstevensjr]

7 hours ago, bernhard said:

i recently found one very nice solution that would even be free for 1 "operator" and that has an API and is abased on PHP & MySQL so it should perfectly fit with processwire: https://www.livezilla.net/features/en/

i didn't try it until now, but if anybody wants to give it a try i would be interested in the results

I will be giving it a try.  Thanks for the heads up.

[clsource]

Maybe this can help too

 

https://www.tawk.to/

[webhoes]

@renobird, have you re-considered releasing the code for your ticket system or partly.

Basicly the part that creates new tickets from emails and sends updates is the most important and difficult.