F/OSS Customer Management Tools

Two programs I recently added to my toolset are osTicket and Project Pier. Personally, I find it easier to bill when you give your client tangible proof of the work you did, are doing, and will do, and both of these tools definitely help towards that objective.

osTicket, while not nearly as extensible as something like, say, RT (Request Tracker), is a fairly straight forward ticking software program that does the “basics” well enough — autocreate tickets sent to email address (e.g. support@yourDomain.com), let you easily manage as assign tickets, pop the account that’s receiving the email, etc.

Project Pier is a sort of free PHP-based version of Basecamp, which is actually quite useful in team environments that need to work closely together and share the project data with clients. Project Pier is free (GPL), easy-to-install, and has almost all of the same important features as the pay version of Basecamp. I’m using it now instead of the other Basecamp-clone I switched to last year, activeCollab (HOWTO on upgrading from activeCollab to Project Pier (which I have not tried yet).