Help Desk and Knowledge Base tools?

November 20, 2007 – 6:15 pm

Can anybody out there recommend a good help desk application? We’re currently using Timpani, which has a bitchin’ live chat tool (and we’ll keep that) but their knowledge base tool is not exactly what we need.

We’d like it to be hosted on our own domain, for one.

Currently, when we send email replies, they come from the Timpani server. Sometimes, Timpani has deliverability problems (hey, we all have occasional delivery problems). But we want control over our email problems.

We’d like it to handle email tickets, but as we answer them, turn them into public knowledge base articles that other people can read. That way we don’t have to keep re-writing stuff into the KB.

It needs a good WYSIWYG interface to upload screenshots. As fast as a blog. And those images need to be hosted on our server.

It needs to generate realistic URLs that we can forward to people. No dynamically generated, 500 character URLs that break whenever they wrap in emails.

Oh, it needs to be PHP/MySQL based.

When we first searched for a good ticketing system, the choices were scarce. Now, there’s a bunch to choose from. Anybody out there have any recommendations?

Here’s what we’re looking at now:

• I’ve always been fond of H2Desk’s interface
• Help Desk Pilot looks promising
• ActiveKB looks nice, but it’s only a KB system. No issue tracking/ticketing?
• RightNow looks like the 900 pound gorilla of this bunch, but I’ve found their technology "actually useful" over at the Alienware support site. I loved and used the "notify me if this answer gets updated" feature.

If you’ve got experience with any of these (or something better), please let me know. Email me at ben at mailchimp dot com, or just post a comment below.