Opening the lines of communications with open source software

SUNY Geneseo's original commercial helpdesk software was purchased and implemented nearly ten years ago. The drawbacks of managing a large software installation (high annual maintenance costs, complex administration needs that could not be met with current staffing levels, and prohibitive expansion costs) led to our exploration of a new helpdesk solution for the campus.We selected to implement open source helpdesk software. This decision has benefits beyond financial ones. Our customers now have self-service capabilities allowing them to create, view, and respond to their own issues. Customers are automatically notified via e-mail when a new ticket is entered on their behalf and when that issue has been resolved. We also expanded the software to other areas of our IT department for project management and internal problem tracking.The flexibility of the solution we implemented allows us to work towards changing many of our paper based, poorly tracked processes to be far more transparent and easy to maintain and monitor.We will discuss the impact of an open helpdesk system from management, technical, and customer perspectives, talk about the trials, tribulations, and hurdles we had to overcome along the way, and give a live demonstration of our implementation.