If by web-based you mean hosted then this is not exactly what you are looking for, but for request tracking it is very hard to beat RT (http://bestpractical.com/) both on functionality and the price is right - free open source. It is a pretty easy to install and maintain so it is worth a look.

If you want a bit more CRMish functionality and a hosted solution I would definitely give Zoho a look. You get the first 3 users for free and then only $12 per user per month for each additional user. A great price for what you get.

Good Luck - MH

FogBugz from Fog Creek. They’re rolling out there new hosted version.

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/

The Zoho CRM is pretty great and free (for up to 3 users). It can generate web forms for you that you can embed in your own site that will create Lead entries for you, or Support Tickets (called ‘Cases’), etc. It amazingly feature rich and worth a look.

http://www.zoho.com/

Highrise does exactly that.

See how Highrise, email, and tasks are best friends: http://www.highrisehq.com/email

Main site: http://www.highrisehq.com

Merlin, do be sure to let us know where you land on this.

Fear Cerebrus. It’s the system we were using at Site5 when I started, and we all whined so loudly that the Powers That Be switched over to Kayako. The only problem with Kayako is that the coolest org. features (notification of new emails without having it open, etc.) are Windows-only. They don’t seem very Mac-interested.

I say, go FOSS, perhaps check out rubyforge, see what’s been cooking. :) I’ll keep my eyes open for you.

Hey there! I’m the lead developer on Cerberus Helpdesk. Somebody on our team pointed me to this blog post since we’ve been getting some clicks. Thanks for the mention!

When considering Cerberus Helpdesk you should definitely be looking at the 4.0 rewrite we’ve been working on for the past 9 months.

The new concepts are really well explained in our wiki: http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/New_Changes

@Carla: I’m sorry to hear you guys had trouble. As far as notifications of new tickets, that’s nothing special and shouldn’t require a Windows application in the tray. Embrace the power of RSS! There are a million feed readers out there which will give you Growl-like notifications on your Mac.

In Cerberus 4.0 you can export any ticket list to an RSS feed, including your own custom searches (new replies waiting for you). You can even use services like Anothr.com to turn that RSS feed into IM notifications: http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/Tips%26Tricks

Exactly the same problem - emails from Clients lost in the wash of junk. We’ve started trialling Active-Collab, which has proved to be quite successful. Although our more technically savvy clients have adopted it happily, our internal management (less savvy) has struggled with the idea..

http://www.activecollab.com/

It is basically like old 37Signals basecamp, which we also tried, but which the aforementioned management couldn’t get to grips with actually paying for project management software :(..

I know this is off the subject, but does anyone know some good open source solutions for online forms where the answers get captured and emailed back or saved in a database?

Hi, Jeff—I do respect your work on Cerebrus. I cannot imagine what it takes to create and maintain a program that complicated. :O Please don’t take offense.

I should have added that the main reason we wanted to switch was we had to chat with customers as part of it all, and the chat interface/program wasn’t always responsive, etc. Plus, it didn’t integrate as well (back then—I have no idea, now); if someone was abusing the chat system, we could not tell from their ticket history, and vice versa, so we were flying blind in that respect.

I’ll sing one high and long note of well-earned praise for Cerebrus—it exports and backs up beautifully. All of the tickets safely live in company backups, and in Kayako. Any program or system that has an in door, but no out, makes me nervous.

If you ever want some userlevel notes from then (we switched about 9 months ago, I think), please feel free to contact me. I’m happy to help.

Glad you found this thread!

If you are looking for an Open Source solution OTRS (Open Ticket Request System). They have greatly improved as from ver 2.1.1 , and also it has addon Packages. www.otrs.org

my 2 c

I’m not sure a true CRM package is really what Merlin is asking for. If I’m guessing correctly, he wants something where multiple people can take turns replying on behalf of the “company,” provides a todo-like inbox, makes it easy to reply with saved snippets or templates, and provides threaded histories for each subject. To me, CRM implies you might want to initiate contact at a later date with a person. Most times, this just isn’t necessary when dealing with a lot of incoming public email. When dealing with mass amounts of incoming email, the responses become more important than the contact information. Besides, keeping thousands of contacts like bigarmadillo75@aol.com don’t yield a lot of upside.

This is why I would lean away from some of the full blown CRM solutions and focus on something that just does email management well.

Yes, Shameless self promotion, but Heap CRM, does this exactly. The details on getting e-mail in can be found here:

http://heap.wbpsystems.com/email/

But Heap can also use templates to send e-mail to people (and you can do it on a schedule if you want to send them automatically). We have a post about this here:

http://blog.wbpsystems.com/2007/08/15/timed-e-mails-in-heap-crm/

Anyhow, sorry for the shameless self plug, but this is absolutely what heap is designed to do.

Sorry, me again. One thing I forgot to mention. Heap has this fairly unknown but useful feature to categorize messages while your e-mailing them in. So for instance whenever we get a support issue we put:

[category: support issues]

in the e-mail body before we forward it in. This automatically places the email in that category (this is in addition to the auto association to a lead, opportunity, customer or archive). Of course you can change categories, so we have another category called “archived support issues.” When someone is done with the issue we simply change categories on the message. I don’t know how many of our customers do this, because you can create tasks/events by email as well and place them on the calendar; but we have personally found this works better if all you are doing is trying to find someone to respond to an email.

I’d also recommend HelpSpot. I can also handle remote form submissions from your own domains via it’s email API (or direct if you want to replicate the form structure).

I’m currently using the Drupal Case Tracker module, and its great. The flexibility of using tools like CCK and Views with your tickets is invaluable.

The email integration is obviously a big issue, and it comes with a module that can check a pop3 account, but for real time updating via email (like RT), I’m working on a module that will parse the incoming email and submit it as a ticket/comment via the Drupal XMLRPC.

I’ve always been frustrated with the number of ticketing systems out there that all have one or two key elements missing.

Hi,

FogBugz, by FogCreek Software.

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/

I’ve tried a lot of ticketing systems, from RT and even Bugzilla, this was the best one so far.

I like the use of Baysean filtering to sort email messages in folders.

Best regards,

I can recommend roundup (http://roundup.sourceforge.net/), a python based tracking system. I used it at a prior company for internal help desk management, and it was so successful that it as used by sales engineering for handling it’s tasks as well.

At another company it was what received the email forms on the web site.

Nothing compares to HelpSpot: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/

Consider Sproutit Mailroom. I think it’s simple, looks good, and handles common replies nicely.