OsTicket — An open source helpdesk ticketing platform

My friend is looking for a ticketing platform for her place of work in a medium scale advertising, marketing firm.

I evaluated LimeSurvery but seems development on it has stalled and things are little bit difficult to figure out.

Google forms would have worked for this use case as the only requirement is to capture responses to a spreadsheet, but as with most firms, all cloud apps are blocked to prevent data leak and malicious downloads etc.

Now I am reviewing OsTicket.

I have installed it using XAMPP which is a very easy and simply way to run a powerful webserver with Apache, MySQL and Perl on your local workstation. It will easy handle a good amount of traffic for most needs.

Some quick notes to keep in mind while installing OsTicket:

• Use this XAMPP installation guide on YouTube.
• It's good to change the default port numbers for your apps where ever you can, but it depends on other considerations too.
• To install OsTicket on XAMPP use this video on Youtube. 
• When creating the MySQL Database and User, you might get something like this:
  

  Error: 1018 SQLSTATE: HY000 (ER_CANT_READ_DIR)
  Message: Can't read dir of '%s' (errno: %d - %s)
  

  this Message takes me to SQL Query in the PHPmyadmin server which shows this,
  

  SHOW PLUGINS SONAME LIKE '%_password_check%' 

  Just create a directory as stated in the answer:
  

  If you installed XAMPP in the default folder C:\xampp go and manually create the folder C:\xampp\mysql\lib\plugin in Explorer. This should fix the user creation issue

• You might get a blank page after you install OsTicket. Like I did and also reported here. Do this:
  

  change
  max_execution_time=30
  
  to
  max_execution_time=180
  
  in php.ini file and restart all services
  
  should work.

  You find this file in C:\xampp\php

• You can create a free gmail account and achieve email notifications from the OsTicketing server. Your ticket creating users also get canned responses after creating a ticket!

Some limitations in OsTicket:

• If you want to export ticket data to excel, it doesn't here support selecting the fields to export.
• Also it doesn't allow you to export the internal custom fields which you might have added to your ticket

These features are already in the pipeline.

This is a very easy to use and powerful ticketing platform rivaling the best of support systems out there.

Give it a shot in your lab environment and evaluate it at least once!