TicketDesk is an open source issue tracker. It is a fast, simple, and nearly effortless tool that will assist Help Desks in servicing the needs of their users.
TicketDesk is written in C# on the .NET 3.5 framework. It can be hosted on any IIS 6 or IIS 7 web server with SQL Server 2005 (or SQL 2005 Express). And it makes use of Microsoft's Ajax and LINQ to SQL technologies.
Background:
At my employer's office we use a help-desk application called Census by MetaQuest software. Census, to put it mildly, is total crap. It is slow, cumbersome, complex, and annoying to use. It is also a nightmare to install, keep running, and administer.
When searching for alternatives I came to realize that nearly all of the help desk applications on the market suffer from the same kinds of problems.
They all have these complex customizable workflows you have to manage, complex permission systems, and so many fields that even the dedicated IT staff end up ignoring most of them. They Also tend to be hard to install, difficult to configure, and tedious to maintain.
Then you have the endless categorization... what's the priority, what's the severity, what's the impact on the users, what kind of problem is it, what kind of user reported the problem, what operating system is installed on the system with the problem, what gender was your first pet dog....
ENOUGH!
The end-user's don't want complexity.
Requiring end-users to fill out complex forms with all kinds of technical jargon just scares them... which means they don't fill out tickets until their small problems have become really big ones.
The help desk doesn't want complexity either.
Sure, they are used to complexity, but your help desk is overworked, under-staffed, and are under a lot of pressure to fix everything RIGHT NOW!
It doesn't matter if it is a 5 person mom-and-pop shop or a fortune 50 company, your help desk is always under the gun and they just don't have time to fill out a "detailed" report with 500 fields just to say "I rebooted the server and everything is fine now".
The marketing for most help-desk applications will go on about searchability, knowledge-bases, and how your help desk tickets can be used to build a database of problems and solutions which will improve efficiency by leveraging past experiences. Some even promise to turn your issue tracker into a customer-facing self-help support web site (if you aren't ready to vomit now, you haven't worked on a real help desk before).
That's a great idea, and it does well the sales meetings with upper management.
But it also total bullshit!
It overlooks the obvious fact that a help-desk issue tracking system is exactly the wrong source for that kind of knowledge sharing. End users describe their problems as best as they can, which means they describe their problems badly at best. The help desk staff will do an equally poor job explaining what they did and how they fixed the problem.
That's just how it is.
No amount of policy, management directives, training, or threats will change the fact that data in your issue tracking system will be hard to search, sketchy about the details, and will totally fail to make a useful knowledge base.
To be successful, your ticket tracking system needs to be efficient, fast, and easy to use. It needs to allow for quick and frictionless communications between the users and IT staff. And most importantly, the system must NOT get in the way. It must be nearly effortless to use and so simple that even a Mac user could figure it out.
TicketDesk is born:
TicketDesk wasn't "planned". It was just something I decided to in my spare time. I needed to write it in only a couple of weeks using no more than 4 hours a day of my time.
It needed to support the end-users and IT staff, but without any unnecessary administration or maintenance.
So the general idea was to implement the simplest ticket tracking system as possible. It would have a very simple non-customizable workflow, as few data fields as possible, and be easy to setup, maintain, and administer.
The other goal was to use as little code as possible. So TicketDesk would have to leverage everything the .net 3.5 framework could muster that might reduce complexity and improve my productivity.
In formulating the basic idea, I also realized that TicketDesk could probably meet the needs of most small IT shops, and probably many larger ones as well. It would also be a good learning tool for beginning programmers and could act as sample code for experienced developers that might be new to asp.net to the 3.5 framework.
So I decided that it would be a great open source project for CodePlex (I may be wrong on that, only time will tell there).
TicketDesk Design:
TicketDesk is designed as a pure help desk issue tracking system. The focus is on the relationship between your users and your IT staff.
It doesn't attempt to be a customer facing support product.
It doesn't attempt to be a customer relationship management system.
And it is not a bug-tracking system to support the software development life cycle.
TicketDesk allows users to submit tickets. It provides help desk with a way to keep track of the tickets. And it facilitates smooth communication between users and help desk.
That's all it does.
TicketDesk concentrates on being simple and effortless. It has very few data entry fields, and demands almost no configuration or administration overhead.
TicketDesk leverages several common web 2.0 concepts to make tickets easier to track and to make working through a ticket more like having a conversation.
TicketDesk probably isn't for everyone though. Large shops that demand tight administrative control over process and permissions will certainly not like it.
But if you have a help desk that wants a system that gets things done, take a look at TicketDesk over at CodePlex...
It's simple to install and free.
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