I came across the free, open source Hesk Helpdesk (http://www.hesk.com) while I was looking for a light weight help system for a project that was starting up. The project has since been put on hold, but Hesk is still a great application for a helpdesk/knowledge base. Hesk is offered as a free downloadable PHP script, as well as a Hosted Version if you do not have a server. The hosted version will cost you $20 US a month. You can also by a license for the downloadable version for $39.95 US to remove the Hesk branding.
While this application is great…
- Allows unlimited staff
- Granular permissions to the system and help desk categories
- Excellent knowledge base built in
- Innovative system that doesn’t require user accounts for clients
It is lacking a few features. I plan to use this application to respond to clients from a number of different projects. As such, it would be nice if they didn’t see ALL of the problem types when submitting tickets. Because Hesk is open source, we can make a few tweaks to get directly to a specific problem type.
Hesk also allows custom fields for your tickets, but it shows all custom fields on all problem types. This can get confusing for users in a multi-project environment. I’m developing a little hack to get around this limitation.
I’ve outlined both of these changes required on my wiki, you can take a look here.