HelpDesk Ticketing System
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@Veet said
Instead of developing one, right from scratch, would it be a bad idea to develop one, based on an existing Open Source solution ?
Because of the nature of software, you kind of need to start from scratch to get what you want, A lot of things have to be re-done and re-written when you take someone else's tool and try to shoe horn it in.
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@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Veet said
Instead of developing one, right from scratch, would it be a bad idea to develop one, based on an existing Open Source solution ?
Because of the nature of software, you kind of need to start from scratch to get what you want, A lot of things have to be re-done and re-written when you take someone else's tool and try to shoe horn it in.
And when said shoehorning is complete... the code is generally... very messy.
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@dafyre said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Veet said
Instead of developing one, right from scratch, would it be a bad idea to develop one, based on an existing Open Source solution ?
Because of the nature of software, you kind of need to start from scratch to get what you want, A lot of things have to be re-done and re-written when you take someone else's tool and try to shoe horn it in.
And when said shoehorning is complete... the code is generally... very messy.
And there are often limitations with what you can change, so before you know it the cost is much higher than starting from scratch with a clean slate.
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@Veet said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@JaredBusch said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@FrostyPhoenix said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
Why not build a ticketing system?
Development costs a fair bit of money.
Someone has to then maintain and support it.
Further dev if you want to add features which also costs money.
Is the cost of a premade tool over the course of a year more or less than building and hosting your own?Now, a ticketing system is the hub of your business as an IT support firm, so whilst you could build it factoring in budget, features and project managing it to make sure it is secure, reliable, fast for years to come. Is it really worth it?
I've had the exact same conversation in house but with a documentation/client management system which we've chosen to build in house but not after exhausting every other option. It's a very very expensive project but nobody else has built a tool that we really need.
Remember that in terms of cost
This is the per hour cost for 160 hours of working time across a month to have a pre-built product which works amazingly well. So the math has to be done to build a new one from scratch.
Yeah, development is certainly not cheap.
Instead of developing one, right from scratch, would it be a bad idea to develop one, based on an existing Open Source solution ?
Not always a bad idea, but generally. It totally depends on the situation, but "other people's software" takes a long time to learn and once you branch from it, likely you have to maintain their code as well as yours, so the value of the shared project is lost. You have to test, fix, maintain and develop on your own. The benefit to their original code base will often be a huge negative rather than a positive.
In rare cases you might only want to extend, not change or modify, the original and you are very close to what you want with the original... maybe. But I'd say easily 99% of the time, starting from scratch produces a better product with less effort both up front and long term.
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@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@dafyre said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Veet said
Instead of developing one, right from scratch, would it be a bad idea to develop one, based on an existing Open Source solution ?
Because of the nature of software, you kind of need to start from scratch to get what you want, A lot of things have to be re-done and re-written when you take someone else's tool and try to shoe horn it in.
And when said shoehorning is complete... the code is generally... very messy.
And there are often limitations with what you can change, so before you know it the cost is much higher than starting from scratch with a clean slate.
With most open source, nearly all, there would be no limits. GPL, MIT, AGPL, BSD, Apache and other common licenses guarantee 100% legal flexibility. But you still have to know how to do the coding.
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@scottalanmiller said
But you still have to know how to do the coding.
And this is the limit. It's not a license limit, it's a limitation on what their base code/program can do.
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A big concern of changing solutions is the existing tickets. How hard is it to migrate from one solution to another is a question that needs to be asked. I would like to move from Spiceworks to osTicket, but not seeing anything that anyone has done to migrate the tickets. Looks like a script will need to be made to import those old tickets into the new system.
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@Breffni-Potter said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@scottalanmiller said
But you still have to know how to do the coding.
And this is the limit. It's not a license limit, it's a limitation on what their base code/program can do.
More of what you can do (you being the programmer.)
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@Jstear said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
A big concern of changing solutions is the existing tickets. How hard is it to migrate from one solution to another is a question that needs to be asked. I would like to move from Spiceworks to osTicket, but not seeing anything that anyone has done to migrate the tickets. Looks like a script will need to be made to import those old tickets into the new system.
Probably not too horrible.
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@Jstear said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
A big concern of changing solutions is the existing tickets. How hard is it to migrate from one solution to another is a question that needs to be asked. I would like to move from Spiceworks to osTicket, but not seeing anything that anyone has done to migrate the tickets. Looks like a script will need to be made to import those old tickets into the new system.
That's one of the things you do when choosing the tool though. Actually that's the same when choosing any tool in IT.
You want a file server? How do you get the files out
You want a database, how do you xyzTicketing systems are no different.
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@scottalanmiller said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
@Jstear said in HelpDesk Ticketing System:
A big concern of changing solutions is the existing tickets. How hard is it to migrate from one solution to another is a question that needs to be asked. I would like to move from Spiceworks to osTicket, but not seeing anything that anyone has done to migrate the tickets. Looks like a script will need to be made to import those old tickets into the new system.
Probably not too horrible.
We've been using osTicket, for a around ..umm.. 2.5 years now .. It's pretty customizable, just out of the box, with deeper customizations possible with coding .. Infact, OsTicket itself offers Customization as an additional service ..
