HelpSpot is a relatively new help desk management package that has a nice slick
AJAX-y Web interface plus good e-mail and RSS integration. There are a lot of similarities
between helpdesk software and bug-tracking software - indeed, many organizations
use the same application for both - but the use cases are a bit different. For the
help desk, you want something that is designed to integrate well with external customer
information systems, but you usually don't care about things like source code control
integration. HelpSpot is optimized to help you track and respond to customer requests
easily, and to help customers help themselves.
Requests can get into the system through various means - a staffer can type them
in, a customer can enter them through a simple Web-based interface, or you can grab
them via POP3 or IMAP from a dedicated mailbox. However they get in, HelpSpot lets
you define your own rules for automatically assigning new cases to people on your
staff. Unassigned requests sit in a queue until someone decides to take ownership
of them; it's easy to see on the user interface how large this queue is at any time.
When you're working on a request, you can see its entire history, add your own notes,
and choose various ways to resolve it (solved, customer found solution, duplicate,
and so on).
Connectivity is one of the keys here. In addition to the e-mail interface for getting
things in, there's Web-based reporting and RSS for getting things out. There is
also an API called Live Lookup that lets you pull information from other systems
- for example, you can feed a customer number from a request into your accounting
system to get back their account details. Externally, you connect with customers
both through the request system (which provides users with custom URLs where they
can check the status of their requests) and through "Knowledge Books," a hierarchically-structured
version of the classic knowledge base which let you organize your support information
into online books and manuals for ease of reading and scanning. HelpSpot also enables
you to run support forums which interface directly with the request system as well.
The software will run on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, or Free BSD, and can use SQL Server,
MySQL, or PostgreSQL as a database, as well as IIS, Apache, or Lighttpd as a Web
server. This makes setup a bit complex; you won't get the simple "click next" setup
you may be used to from other Windows software even on a Windows box (you need to
get PHP & the Zend optimizer set up first, and there are various manual configuration
steps). The process wasn't difficult, just a bit tedious. Once I got everything
running, though, HelpSpot was easy to use, and the clean design makes the learning
curve very shallow. If your job revolves primarily around supporting customers (as
opposed to fixing bugs), this is one worth looking at.