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[Mr ChriZ]

Since October I've been working for a small company
which sells Methadone Dispensing systems for pharmasists.
We're starting to grow but theres still only 5 of us at the moment.

I'm supposed to be doing development work, but in reality
I'm spending alot of my time on the road driving around
installing systems, helping resolving issues etc.

We also get a hell of a lot of support calls.
We've got a fairly big customer who's trying to decide whether
to use our system or not.
These calls have to be logged, tracked, etc.

This is starting to become a bit of a headache, as we don't
have the financial power to employ someone full
time to deal with calls as yet, and notes get scribbled
down on a bit of paper, lost and thats the end of them.

We've actually got 2 offices 200 miles apart, due to the
fact that me and my collegue work from home.
The software we sell also comes from the States,
so ideally we'd like them to be able to look at our notes,
they're obviously around 7 hours behind us.

My collegue spent some time looking into expensive support monitoring
software, and alot of what he found left alot to be desired.
One package looked ideal till we got it into the office and found it was
completley bug ridden.

He passed the problem over to me this morning, and I was
about to start Googling when I had a brainwave...
Why don't we just setup a forum, where we had a forum
board for each of our major customers.

We can create a new post foreach call that comes in.
It will be visible to those with access, across the interweb.
We can start the call open, then modify it to Closed.

Instantly we get search capabilities, also allowing us to
search for problems we've had before.

Anyhow having used your guys forums for a period now,
I thought I'd try setting one up myself.

Downloaded SMF's software, and also PHP, MySQL, and then
set it up using IIS.  I was expecting it to take me a couple of days
but it was suprisingly easy, and I've got most of it sorted by
the end of the day.

The only problem I've been left with is our main
server seems to be completley blocked by some outside firewall,
so I need to sort that out tomorrow, but should be quickly sortded.

It looks like an ideal soloution for our problem anyhow,
or at least for the short term, and it's cost us nothing so far.

 

I'm having one of those weeks where things aren't going wrong!
Compared to the last month or two, that makes it a good week as far as I'm concerned!

They even let us out of prison early on Monday and Tuesday 

[Robert Taylor]

Mr did you have a look at some of the OpenSource stuff out there?

Eventum: http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (made by MySQL authors)

Mantis: http://www.mantisbt.org/ (I installed and used this in one of my previous positions - simple and easy to setup)

There's quite a bunch of other ones out there. Look here for a (not complete) list of possibilities: http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/

If it were my business, I'd want a more purpose built app., and one which may present a more professional interface to my users, viz. searching for their open tickets etc., but that's purely my opinion...

 

[Mr ChriZ]

Cheers LunchMeat,

The interface isn't to much of an issue as the customers will
not be directly looking at it.  It's rare they even
have internet access, it's more for in house stuff.

I will definitley take a look at those links though.
As I sort of mentioned the forum idea was a short term
soloution really just to replace the bits of paper,
until we get something better in. 

It's also helping us collate other information already.
One area where the forum software is not going to crack it
is some of our customers are requesting reports
on overall use.

[JimH]

Mantis: http://www.mantisbt.org/ (I installed and used this in one of my previous positions - simple and easy to setup)

We've used this and it works well.  So did Bugzilla.

But this forum works better.

[glynor]

We've used this and it works well.  So did Bugzilla.

But this forum works better.

This one's really my absolute favorite of all of them that I use regularly.  It suffers very few quirks from a user perspective, and the editors are nice and reliable (it's also often pretty fast -- but that might be a result of the server it's running on more than the forum code).