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By futurist on
Hi, I'm looking for a help desk solution (for a non-profit organization) in Drupal:
- Anonymous users submit their question through the default contact form, selecting a category
- A ticket is created for each submission, assigned to a staffer according to the category chosen
- A team of staffers can access the tickets, re-assign if necessary, answer them, set their status
I have checked the Support Ticketing System module but I find it weird that the module seems to rely on email for creating and updating tickets. (If a ticket-node could be created upon submission of the contact form independently of email.) Or am I misunderstanding?
Another weird point about Support Ticketing System is its terminology: Does "client" correspond to a category or department?
Thanks for any insight.
Comments
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I haven't tried the support module in a while, but I would find it strange if it limited interactions to email only. That said, you can also create what you describe with core drupal plus the views and rules contributed modules.
Thanks, WorldFallz.
Thanks, WorldFallz. Concerning interactions in support module I was referring in particular to the creation of tickets from contact form submissions: Can that be achieved without email? (So far I was able to create tickets by the node/add/support-ticket form only.)
Concerning a solution with core Drupal plus Views/Rules: Do you know of any example or recipe showing something similar?
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I doubt there'd be a recipe for such a specific use case, but there's plenty of tutorials for learning views and rules (i like the ones over at nodeone.se). Once you do that, it should be fairly obvious how to implement your functionality.
Storm has a new release?
I believe that the Project Management Module(formally Storm) could be configured to use, but it might be a bit much for your needs. I'm using the Support Ticket System, but haven't used it to its fullest yet. It can be configured to have the user disable e-mail notifications. It is kind of a funny setup and a little confusing.
Edit: Depending on how simple and easy you wanted to go, it seems that even just Drupal Commons could do the trick? Using the Q&A part of it you can configure certain roles to answer, plus you still can get e-mail notifications. It might be too simple :)
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IMO both commons (a ginormous distro) and storm (includes tons of unrelated functionality) would way way overkill, not to mention confusing, for the described functionality. I suspect it would be far more time consuming to find the desired functionality in all that and/or figure out how to turn off or disable unwanted functionality than it would be to simply learn views and rules which is good to do anyway.
Most Help desks provide an integrated portal
I do tons of Help Desk / Support work tied to websites.
There are a ton of web-based software solutions out there right now. My favorite is SmarterTrack by SmarterTools. No Drupal module yet. but they have a fully skin-able portal and a free version for 1-agent along with a hosted SaaS version. Wide-open API too. Runs on Windows (heresy!) but runs on its own, separate from the website (lots of advantages!) You can then tie their open API to virtually any web services. Hosted version is pretty cheap per seat.
Use the included portal or tie it into any web form via that API (their online help has it fully documented, which is pretty rare these days).
Also, if you keep the site separate from the help desk you get flexibility -- change one, change the other, change both in the same or different ways. Extra benefit = if site down then support NOT down. Much better way to go in my opinion.
I've put nine sites/brands on it in the last year.
Just my 2 cents.
You can try
You can try http://drupal.org/project/casetracker It won’t solve your problems by default but with some configurations maybe you can get to your purpose.