BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

Ian Landsman, of Helpspot fame, has just launched his first experimental “mini-site” here: Open Source Help Desk List.
I like the honesty and confidence that this shows: honesty because the site doesn’t hide the fact that this is helping to drive traffic to the HelpSpot site, and the confidence that he obviously has in his product to hold its own against the competition.

It’ll be interesting to follow the results of this experiment to see how much of an impact this has on his sales.
And, Ian, the only other opensource product I can think of that you’ve left off is: ZenTrack.

A good post from Ian on FogBugz vs Helpspot as a help desk. Worth reading if you’re currently looking into this area.

I wanted to link to it from here as it nicely follows my previous comparison of help desk software. He also brings up a point worth thinking about early on regarding keeping your help desk and bug tracking software separate.

And, now I continue my investigation with a first look at commercial help desk solutions… (note: that I haven’t yet installed any of these myself. I have formed my opinions from the product’s own web site, tours and any other reviews I’ve come across. I want to see what is/is not worth installing for a closer look)

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I thought a better way to start my comparison of available help desk software would be to go back and have a look at each of their sites, check out any online demo versions and draw up a short list of contenders for further evaluation (i.e. actual installation on my own site). The list came from my previous post.

Let’s start with the Open Source sector…
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I am about to begin a comparison of the various web-based help-desk/support centre software out there at the moment with a view to implementing one of them for my own business.

It may be a case of the “cart before the horse” seeing as I haven’t released any products or services yet to provide support for, but my plan is to have my virtual infrastructure in place early on.

So, the logical place to start is to gather a list of possible contenders in this space. So far, I have the following:

• Commercial:
• Ferrysoft Help Desk
• FogBugz
• HelpSpot
• HelpDesk Connect (added to the list, 9/Feb. Thanks, Terry)
• Open Source:
• BugZilla
• Double Choco Latte
• osTicket
• ZenTrack

I’ll update this list to link to the relevant reviews as I complete them.