Kayako is pretty reasonable with a few caveats. If you self host it, which I recommend from a security/supportability/customization standpoint, then you are also taking the trade off of dealing with upgrading it yourself, which is not always easy. Make use of their LoginShare functionality to offload authentication duties since their internal method is not particularly secure (unsalted SHA1). If you let it parse emails, with large attachments, you'll have to fine tune its memory allowance and how many emails it retrieves per attempt as well as how frequently it grabs them; it can use a lot of memory and it's not the fastest thing, so you don't want to have it happen to frequently where the prior job may still be running. The search functionality is absolutely horrible and has been for at least eight years now; it will turn up completely irrelevant tickets and rarely turns up the correct ones. If what you want to search for is in the ticket body rather than the private ticket notes, you do at least have the option of entering raw SQL LIKE arguments, so you can search for something like %parameter% and let MySQL do the work instead of Kayako, assuming your term is unique enough to find what you needed. If you need a better search of all fields, you'd have to write your own. I haven't personally used the Solarwinds product, but if it's like their others, the license fees will be outrageous, either now or they'll get you later, and their sales staff will bother you incessently with better and better short term promotions. David -----Original Message----- From: Tim Burke [mailto:tb@tburke.us] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 10:36 AM To: Paul Stewart Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Customer Support Ticketing Kayako is the way to go. IIRC they have a trial up on their website, may be worth checking out. Tim ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Stewart" <paul@paulstewart.org> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:01:11 AM Subject: Customer Support Ticketing Hey folks.... We need a new customer ticketing system and I'm looking for input. I am still working on a scope document on everything we want to do with the new system. The most common problem I run across is that a system is either built for enterprise internal IT helpdesk or it is built like a CRM sales tracking system. We are an ISP among other things and are looking for a powerful and yet reasonable cost system to answer email inquiries, allow customers to open tickets via portal, mobile support, escalation/SLA support, and several other things. Solarwinds NPM integration would be a huge bonus but not a deal breaker. If anyone has a system that they have integrated with Ivue from NISC (our billing platform) I would be really interested in hearing more as well. So my question is meant high level. For those folks that are ISP's supporting business customers (including managed customers) along with residential eyeball traffic what system(s) do you use and what do you like/dislike? I've looked so far at WHD (Solarwinds product), OTRS, RT, RemedyForce, ZenDesk, HappyFox, Kayako and several others. All of them so far would require a fair amount of configuration or modifications based on our still developing wish list. Also worth noting is that we have no full time development staff so hoping to find something that has a lot of promise and then work with the vendor to evolve it into what we feel we need. **This is not an invitation for sales folks to call on me** Thanks, Paul