osTicket www.osticket.com is a popular open source customer support ticket system based on PHP and MySQL. It supports both web-based and email based ticket systems. So your customers can either log on to your website to raise a support ticket or they can simply send an email to support. osTicket integrates both channels into a simple web-interface which lets your support staff manage the tickets and provide support to your customers.

There are commercial systems out there which have a whole lot of features that most support staff seldom uses. osTicket is a good way to start your support operations and then (maybe) if your needs are not being met, you might think about changing it. Notice since it is open source you might easily be able to customize it to meet your needs.

Of course, being open source, it is also complete free.

This open source project was recently revived by its authors after a lull of over a year. They started releasing a new version of the product in January this year with the latest release a few days ago. They have a very active forum community of over 700 members with over 1300 posts catering to various topics around osTicket.

Technical Specifications
osTicket requires a web server that can run:

• PHP 4.3 or better
• MySQL 4.1 or better

That’s it. Being PHP and MySQL driven, you can be sure that it will run on your hosting provider’s space. If you host it on IIS on a Windows box, then also you are safe because Windows version of both PHP and MySQL are available.

In terms of hardware, there are no specific requirements. Most shared webhosting hardware is good enough to run this. The users only need to interact with this using a browser.

Installation
osTicket is very simple to install. For the purpose of this review, we will assume that you are installing this on a shared hosting space. The steps for any other installation are very similar.

We are going to walk through the installation steps one by one. Before we begin there are a few steps that need to be taken care of:

• You need to have a web hosting space with the ability to FTP files to it. If you don’t know how to do that you should get in touch with your webhosting support.
• You need to create a MySQL database on your webhosting account and note down the access details to the database (server name, database name, user name, and password). Once again documentation from your webhost or support from them can help you in this regard.
• Finally, you need to download the installation files from http://osticket.com/downloads.php. As of writing this article, the latest version is 1.6 RC4. The file is downloaded as a zip file. You need to extract the contents into a temporary location on your computer.

Let’s begin:

1. Create Folder – Open up your FTP client and navigate to the where you want to install the osTicket software. Now this is a tricky step. Depending on your needs you may take different steps. Most people like to have their support site on a path below their main site. So for example, if your main site is www.onlineobservations.net, then you would want your support site to be www.onlineobservations.net/support or www.onlineobservations.net/help or something similar. To enable this, navigate to the root folder of your main site (in our example: www.onlineobservations.net) and create a folder there called support (or whatever name you want to call it).

2. Copy Files – The files that you extracted earlier from the latest release of the installation files should contain two folders: scripts and upload. Copy all the files in the upload folder to the folder you created in step 1. Make sure that you preserve the folder structure of the extracted files. After the upload is complete, folder structure under your support folder should look like this:

(The exact view may be a little different depending on your FTP client, but importantly all these folders and files should be directly under your support folder.)

3. Another way to do things – A lot of webhosting providers also provide alternate ways of uploading files to the server and you can use any of them. As long as you create a folder where you want the support system to reside and copy the files mentioned in Step 2 in that folder.

4. Tweak some settings – Before we proceed further we need to make a small tweak to the file permissions on one of the files we just uploaded. This file is modified automatically during the setup process and hence should have the correct security permissions to allow that to happen. This file is ostconfig.php. Once again there can be multiple ways to define permissions for the file. You can do this through your FTP client or even through an interface that your web hosting provider may offer. If you are not sure how to do it, your best bet is to contact support at your web host to help you out.

What we need to do is to set permissions on ostconfig.php so that it is writeable by the web server. The easiest (though not the safest) thing to do is to give it all permissions (we will be able to revert those later). So, set the permission on your file to 777 (on Windows environment, this is an equivalent of giving Full Control to Everybody).

5. Now Install – Once we have done all of the above, we begin the installation. Fire up your browser and type in the following address in it: http://yourdomain/support. Here replace the yourdomain by the address of your website and support by whatever was the name of the folder you created in Step 1. Now, if everything in the previous steps was done properly you shouldn’t see any errors. If you see any errors then go back and check that each step was executed properly. If everything went fine you should see this screen:

You can fille out the Title, Url, Email, Admin Login Details, and Database details. We created a MySQL database as part of the preparation and the details from that step go in there. We now click Install.

6. Complete installation and cleanup – So, after we click that button, assuming that all the details provided were correct, we get this screen:

Basically, at this step we need to perform some cleanup. We need to change the permissions on the ostconfig.php back to what they were originally. And we need to delete the setup folder.

7. Troubleshooting – In case you encounter problems during installation, ensure the following:

• PHP is installed on your web server.
• MySQL is installed and the information that you are providing is correct.
• The permissions on the ostconfig.php file are given. Verify by checking the permissions again after you assigned them.
• The files are copied under the right path as directed in the step-by-step instructions.
• If you still can’t work it out, check out http://osticket.com/wiki/Home or http://osticket.com/forums/ or contact us and we will be glad to assist you.

Functional Review
Now that we have installed the software let’s see what it looks like. Let’s begin by what your customers will be seeing.

User Interface

Navigating to http://www.onlineobservations.net/support (our test site) shows the following page:

As you can see, it’s very simple for the customers. They can create a new ticket and check the status of an old ticket based on their email id and ticket number.

Creating a New Ticket

Your customers can fill out the information and a ticket is created and a confirmation email is sent to them with the ticket number. This ticket number can be used to login to the site and track the status of the ticket.

Tracking the Status

Using the ticket number and email id, the customers can login to the helpdesk to track status. There they can view status for all their previous tickets as well (as shown in the screen below):

Administration and Staff Panels

Now here is where the meat of the work is done. Your HelpDesk staff gets a panel of their own, and you as admin have your own panel from where you can setup the system.

The features available in the admin panel include:

• Software Settings – these let you configure things like time formats, ticket options, grace periods, session timeouts, and a whole lot more.
• Email Settings – these let you specify the various email accounts that you can use to respond to your tickets. They can be assigned to various departments for auto responders as well.
• Help Topics – these help you define the broad categories for which you are providing support. The customer can choose these topics to categorize their ticket. This further helps for auto assigning the tickets to departments because you can associate the topic to a department.
• Staff Settings – here is where you can add help desk staff, assign them to departments, and give them roles (admin, staff, or manager).
• Department Settings – finally, this is where you create your departments and define their settings.

The staff panel has simpler features:

• One interface to access all the tickets which they need to work with.
• Another interface to access a Knowledge Base which can have articles or premade replies for tickets.
• A third interface to access the company directory in case they need to reach a coworker.

Summary

There are a lot of other neat features in this little package which can be explored after installing it and by visiting the forums. There are other products out there (Kayako Support Suite being one of the most popular) which are far more advanced than osTicket, but they usually carry a price tag and an overkill for most situations.

Finally, we would recommend this osTicket support ticket software for anyone who is looking to setup a basic HelpDesk for two main reasons: its free and easy to setup and use.
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Vaibhav Gadodia is a software architect working for a prominent software company. He is interested in anything to do with the Internet and technology. He has a Masters in Computer Application and a Bachelors in Computer Science. He likes to maintain his personal blog in his spare time called Habitually Good.
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