Recommendations needed: Help desk software

[fluiddruid]

I work for a small organization and we're looking for new software for our tech support and customer service emails. We currently use Kayako. Unfortunately, we're locked into an old, unsupported version because we don't want to require account signup to send us email, and we're looking to see what is available out there.

We're looking for something appropriate for a small department (let's say 5 people) that has the capacity for multiple email queues. It needs to be able to handle attachments as well, and have the ability to set predefined responses, but our needs are generally basic.

Anyone have any good experiences with such software?

[ZipperJJ]

Just as a reference point for you...we used SmarterTicket because it came free with our server package, and while it worked decently for a few years for us, we stopped using it because of some kind of glitch...which now I don't recall

Anyway, SmarterTicket does everything you need but I would not recommend it. It didn't stop running or anything but there was something weird about how it ran and it just drove us bonkers. I think it was random slowness, which we decided probably came from some memory leak or badly-written queries.

[Clothahump]

Best one I have worked with is Track-It .

[Number]

OTRS is free, open source, and should meet the requirements you've listed. I recently set it up for a ten-person department and found the configuration to be very friendly. You can tell that the documentation was written by people for whom English is not a primary language, but all the important information is there.

Various levels of non-free technical support are also available.

[Motorgirl]

My organization uses RT. We installed it about a year ago and are still working on configuring it to our needs. I am not involved in installing or maintaining it, so I can't speak to those aspects. We have about 100 people using the system to support a "customer" community of around 5000 people, and are very pleased with it.
The software itself is open source and free, but we do contract with Best Practical for various things.

More information here:
http://bestpractical.com/rt/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_Tracker

I think the best aspect is the name of their knowledge base feature - RT FAQ Manager (a.k.a. RTFM)

[fluiddruid]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will be checking them out when I'm back in the office; one I found, that seems reasonably priced and very feature-rich, is Cerberus. Has anyone used it?