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Why Open source?
Status of mhd
License
Features
Screen shots
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mhd is based on PHP Helpdesk - a helpdesk
application originally written in PHP by Joseph Hoot. TID management is based on Kbshare (not finished) originally written by Brian Snipes. It uses MySQL as
the database backend.
Support, documents, and more project info than you reasonably might want is on: The mhd project page at Sourceforge. Which is also a good place to start if you feel like getting involved with improving mhd.
I became involved in the
mhd project when looking for a good helpdesk system to aid our small
support organisation at work. Having looked at some Windows based systems and
found some that were good enough I found that they were way to expensive.
(We're talking 10's of thousands of $s here). A few were better priced but still
- they cost a lot. The natural next step was to build something myself, or looking
for a project I could adopt. PHP Helpdesk a helpdesk written in PHP fitted the bill nicely enough. A few
weeks later I've added some usefull stuff and new tricks to PHP Helpdesk. Eventually I added
many quite a few new features and starting thinking of re-writing the whole thing. When this happens
mhd (Martins Helpdesk) will surely have a life of its own.
"A key reason for using opensource is the security of knowing that there will never come a time when your business is forced to change or upgrade applications because of market forces outside of your control. As long as you have the complete source code, are permitted by license to modify it and it is written in a reasonably popular programming language you will be able to maintain it." (Linux Med News on why to choose FreePM)
I pretty much feel that PHP qualifies as a "reasonably popular programming language" so you should have no problems modifying the source (I manage after all) if you wish.
Software from my site
should be considered alpha release and might be quite buggy. That said, I use
it daily at work so the more disturbing bugs get noticed and fixed.
mhd is released under the
GPL license. This basically
means you can grab it, do with it whatever you wish as long as you recognize the
original developer of the software. PHP Helpdesk is also free in the meaning of
"free beer". It would be great if you enjoy using mhd and could submit
patches to me for this development version.
- Management of tickets (add, modify, delete)
- Support tickets is what the whole thing is about.
- Management of users (add, modify, delete)
- Users are the tech personell answering support tickets.
- Management of clients (add, modify, delete)
- Clients are the people submitting tickets.
- Management of Departments
- You can (should) assign users and clients to departments.
- Management of Categories
- You can (should) setup ticket categories for the system.
- Lend/ Lease functionality
- You can book and keep track of equipment that you lend people.
- Basic management of TIDs (add, modify, delete)
- A TID is a document detailing procedures to solve a certain technical issue.
- Very basic stock inventory
- You can keep a list of stuff you have in stock..
- Very basic knowledgebase integration (add, view)
- You can add solutions to a knowledgebase and the users can see the list of added solutions.
- Email support. (send)
- You can (optionally) notify users of new tickets by email.
- You can customize the message in the mails send for each new ticket or event.
- Fast ticket submittance
- The client can submit tickets without being logged in through the start page.
- Fast booking submittance
- The client can book equipment without being logged in through the start page.
A GPL software page without screen shots? It's preposterous. It's unheard of .... . These are oldish though (I'll upload new ones when I get the time).
To try it out you can download
mhd from here (see below).
mhd:
Current version: 0.5.5
| Date |
Version |
Comments |
| 2001 05 01 |
Current release |
Many bugfixes. Integration with IRM for hardware management. |
| 2001 04 25 |
0.5.0 |
Major interface redesign. Added equipment booking and basic stock inventory. Bug fixes. |
| 2001 04 13 |
0.4.1 |
You can now post tickets without being loged in. Experimental feature, turned off by default.
More bug fixes. Some of the brown paper bag variety. |
| 2001 04 12 |
mhd 0.3.5 |
The first stable release!
The extremely irritting time-out bug is gone. I re-designed authentication which doesn't depend on cookies any more and it went away. Thankfully. Some minor other bug fixes as well. |
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Issues:
There certainly are issue in there. This is alpha-level software after all. However I haven't found any show stoppers now that the biggie is (hopefully) squashed. Some things I've noticed:
- Producing a printable ticket brings up lots of service tasks which are not saveable.
- Preferables view all tickets saves every second time. Not every save. Hmm.
- Notify client box on Add ticket event does nothing. (Isn't really a bug, just haven't completed that yet).
Requirements: You need PHP 4 and MySQL. If you don't have PHP installed and access
to a MySQL database mhd wont do anything even remotely usefull. Get them here:
MySQL
PHP
Quick version:
- Untar the latest package.
- Read the README and INSTALL files
for installation instructions, basically you may need to edit the database
connection file, have a good look at the general config file and my footer file. It is recommended that you change the e-mail
notification messages from the Preferences menu as well.
- Create as database to store the tables. then build the database tables
using mhd.sql.
- Done! Log in as admin (ID/pw - admin/admin). It works for me.
It should work for you. Let me know
if it doesn't.
Much of the basic stuff I thought about has been completed. Lot's of bug fixes need to be applied though. Keith Schoenefeld (one of the authors of IRM) and I are talking about mergeing mhd and IRM into an excellent helpdesk system. If this actually happens I plan to back port things into mhd. So what is now mhd might be a low-end helpdesk and the new IRM/mhd a higher end helpdesk. Only the future will se what happens. There are some stuff that I still feel can be added to mhd. LDAP connectivity, XML-support, extended stock inventory, ticket escalation, SLA support etc etc.
Bugs, questions, etc
Send it to me: chimbis@skjoldebrand.org
Or, if you feel like getting involved you can check out the project page on Sourceforge.
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