Support at RoboSavvy is currently given by phone and email and we kind of have rolls of who does what. But as one of the employees left all of a sudden, it became evident that lots of important stuff was in her gmail account and inaccessible. Gmail is great in many ways. One of the important features in terms of providing email support is having full-text search of email archive and threaded messages.
It is time to look around and see how to organize the email support, and in addition maybe upgrade the way other tasks are performed such as ordering from suppliers, discussing custom pricing with suppliers and customers, promising things that will happen in the future pending other things. Currently this is done with paper and it works but some automation would not hurt.
OTRS is a German old-school public domain software in Perl that dates back more than 10 years. So it doesn't have the Web2.0 coolness but it seems to have many many features to discover. Their support is given via mailing list.. oh no!
Installation didn't go smoothly on my test linux VPS (cheapvps.co.uk $7/month. see vps bargains). With Centos5.3 i expected "yum install otrs" to pull the magic but it didn't and it took a couple of days to figure out things. The reason was that the otrs RPM that normally hosts Centos/RedHat packages is not up to date and had a 2 year old version of orts (this packages installs under /var/www whereas the one that works that was downloaded from otrs.org installs in /opt/otrs/). Also the many perl packages needed were not up to date. The solution was to downloaded the needed perl packages from CPAN and the RPM directly from orts.com. The crontab script had to be run manually - this is all in the INSTALL file and INSTALL.RedHat file in the otrs home directory /opt/otrs/)
The German company that is behind OTRS recently went public on the German stock exchange. But IMHO seems like they have no clue regarding the expected internet presence and customer experience of their web sites and user interface of the system. If they can't just say "I want my site to look like this one" and take some US native speaker web savvy consultant to pimp up their everything, then this will give yet another bit of bad reputation to Web companies going public. I hope they made a bunch of money on the public offering because they wont make much on commercial support if they depend on their web presence.
Overall so far OTRS does some nice organizing of email support workflow. I wish this functionality was simply hosted on Google Apps. This would be a perfect fit. Zoho have some CRM functionality and ofcourse big things like sales.com and salesforce.com. I need to check comercial alternatives once i get a bit more experience with OTRS although maybe having the Perl source code allows for customization as in Oscommerce that beats everyone else because of the state of chaos it is in and customization-ability if offers.
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