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Web Help Desk offers now a free version of its help desk software

Mircea Goia — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:43:43 +0000

WebHelpDesk is known for its Java help desk software. The lite and full version is not free (between $180 and $900).
But now they are offering a free version of their software for small business, K-12 institutions, and small government organizations.
The Free Edition has no trial period or expiration date, is completely free from ads, and includes one full year of help desk software upgrades.
It’s a good move because they know there are some good free help desk software outhere like osTicket (more software here) and also paid software.
Thus, they try to get more users of their product which in time might become paying customers. In these times you need to do everything to acquire new customers and if that means giving away software so be it.

The FREE version of Web Help Desk is a one technician seat version of the Web Help Desk Lite edition, with an unlimited number of endusers. There are NO functionality restrictions with this free version.

Key benefits of this free help desk software edition include:

* Web Portal – A full customer support web portal for endusers to submit service requests, view ticket updates, and seek self help or view auto-suggested solutions from the knowledge base.

* Email-to-Ticket Conversion – Automatic email-to-ticket conversion ensures that service requests submitted via email do not fall through the cracks and breach SLA.

* Ticket History and Audit Trails – Support staff may add notes (and hidden notes) to each ticket, from the web app or via email. Every update to a ticket is recorded by username and time date stamp.

* Knowledge Base – The mentioned customer service Knowledge Base also allows article visibility to support staff only; building an extensible and searchable internal knowledge base.

* LDAP and Active Directory Integration – Utilize your current LDAP or AD directory for login authentication and to schedule imports of customer data.

* SLA Email Alerts and Reminders – Configure various Service Level Agreements for email alerts and reminders to be sent to support staff.

* Graphical Performance Reports – Run a variety of help desk reports to increase productivity and create new efficiencies. Reports may be run real-time, exported to spreadsheets, or through automated email delivery.

For more details check their website or download it from here (well, I have an advice for them: please don’t ask the users of the free software to fill out that form! I know you might need those data for marketing purposes – you are a commercial company after all, but users are not seeing it like that: if it’s free why would I need to register?)

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Web Help Desk software integrates with LANrev client management solution

Mircea Goia — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:25:43 +0000

Web Help Desk, a pioneering web-based help desk software solution, announced integration with LANrev Client Manager, a leading cross-platform client and patch management software suite. Imported LANrev asset discovery data and instant access to LANrev client management tools from within Web Help Desk promotes immediate and quantifiable technician efficiencies.

Automated imports of LANrev’s reliable asset discovery data into the Web Help Desk provide support personnel with up-to-date hardware and software details for the computer identified in the service desk ticket. If additional software license management analysis is required or software patches need to be deployed, Web Help Desk provides instant, asset-specific accessibility to the the LANrev Admin application.

Web Help Desk’s integration with LANrev Client Manager makes initiating an LANrev desktop control session a simple mouse click away. From within a Web Help Desk ticket or asset search, support professionals can instantly access all of LANrev’s features and benefits.

About MacsDesign Studio
Founded in 1998, MacsDesign Studio LLC is a global provider of the Web Help Desk software suite, the leading cross-platform service desk management solution for help desk and customer support professionals who seek to simplify and control their increasingly complex service environments. The extensive feature set of the Web Help Desk software addresses critical IT and support areas, including: Incident and Problem Management, Asset and Desktop Management, Knowledge Management, and Approval Workflow.

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Web Help Desk software is integrated now with Apple Remote Desktop

Mircea Goia — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:31:45 +0000

MacsDesign Studio LLC, the developers the Web Help Desk (the leading cross-platform help desk software solution), announced today the integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3, Apple’s award-winning desktop management system for Mac OS X.

The easy access to ARD information and instant remote control connectivity from within the Web Help Desk promises to boost technician productivity and raise the bar on customer satisfaction.

A scheduled or on-demand import of asset discovery data directly from the ARD database to the Web Help Desk provides support professionals with the critical, up-to-date asset information required to efficiently resolve service requests. This new integration makes Apple Remote Desktop 3 asset data available to any web browser through one centralized web application.

Web Help Desk’s integration with Apple Remote Desktop 3 makes initiating an ARD control session a simple mouse click away. Technicians can instantly access all of ARD’s features and benefits from a Web Help Desk ticket or asset view.

Hopefully, they will add even more features in the future making it better. We, here at MyTestBox, will review this help desk software soon.

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Launched: Web Help Desk Software – Version 9

Bill Morrison — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:24:39 +0000

We’ve all been there. When we need it most, the ‘help desk’ turns out to be a ‘no-help desk’, leaving us frustrated and mad at the host company (which might be our company). Well, they’ve actually been paying attention to this. Newer, server-side hosted, browser based help desk solutions keep getting closer to the holy grail of a fully functioning service desk.

With this in mind, MacsDesign Studio LLC announced version 9 of their popular cross platform product, Web Help Desk. This entirely web-based product now adds a rule-based voting and approval system for change requests, a user interface enhanced with AJAX, and an extensible plugin architecture. It’s still cross platform, with installers for all the popular servers- Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X.

Point and click
So far, the focus in these help desk ‘improvements’ always seems to be the customer over the service personnel. It’s about time someone realized that servicing the enduser (the tech or manager) is key to getting the problem resolved. And problem resolution is what the customer is going to remember in the end.

Understanding this, Web Help Desk uses a filtering, point and click interface to categorize service requests before the e-mail goes out.

From their site:

These Request Type Categories assist in providing high-level information to service desk personnel, as well as assist in Web Help Desk’s automatic assignment of tickets to the correct personnel, group of personnel, location, and correct department.

But there’s even more point and click. Installation and customizing your filters are set up for non-programmers. This allows the people who need the information set up the forms.

Next, the software displays a list of all software and hardware assets assigned to the request submitter. This gives techs the unique info they need without having to pry it out of reluctant and largely ignorant users. (”When I double click the thingie, that other bit with the colors doesn’t come up.”) From a service department management point of view, Web Help Desk provides loads of report options- tracked and linked to incidents and assets involved. You can bet when the complaints about X not doing Y start rolling in, they aren’t going to stop with the first fix.

Finally, Web Help Desk allows shunting similar problem types to the right solver. It can rank and send tickets to the people most likely to solve them quickly and correctly. This last one might be the most important feature of all. I can’t tell you how often I get the phone tag shuffle until finally (maybe) I get routed to the right person.

You can see their demo here.

The Web Help Desk software is deployed as a Java servlet running under the Apache Tomcat 5.5 servlet container (included in the installation). A compatible Java 5 Runtime Environment (JRE) is included for all platforms except Mac OS X and Solaris, which have a pre-installed JRE. Because the application is 100% pure Java, you have the freedom to install the Web Help Desk server-side software on the operating system of your choice without the worry of OS lock-in.

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osTicket – a PHP/MySQL customer support ticket system

Vaibhav Gadodia — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:44:52 +0000

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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