For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into Freshdesk instead of Zendesk.
Some reasons:
* Free tier up to three users
* Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC)
* More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC)
Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to upsell you : )
You make a ticket by email, it adds to the system, a support agent is assigned to it, so far so good... then a developer with access to see the ticket goes to the ticket page and adds a helpful reply, except the ticket creator never hears about it. It's registered on the ticket web UI, but the creator of the ticket is ONLY notified of the responses by the support agent only. This sucks big time (and AFAIK is not configurable.)
Also god forbid someone uses email (or an email alias you're part of) to make the ticket and you accidentally do Reply All so your reply creates a brand new ticket just for you as opposed to appearing as a response in the initial ticket. It's so dumb. (You can get a ticket ID to put in a brand new email and then your reply would be registered but you need to know the ticket number first AND it still suffers the same issue that if you are not the support agent your reply is registered but never notified to the ticket creator.)
If your support is always 1-to-1 then by all means Freshservice is fine, though.
Thanks Vijay Freshservice Support
Our support volume is manageable by just a few agents. If we needed to manage teams of agents and different support channels, freshdesk or zendesk might have won out as they seem to be stronger in that area.
That said, you can't beat a free tier if all you need is a basic ticketing system. Just thought I'd share some of the other options out there.
Saying this as someone who inherited several drupal projects that would have benefited greatly if they were coded from scratch (well, with standard library/frameworks) instead of "done the drupal way".
But, this looks really nice, and since I'm stuck with Drupal for the foreseeable future (I can't afford to stop everything to do another migration at this point), I will likely look into how difficult migrating our tickets from Project Issue would be. I don't suppose there's already a migration for that?
Also, using a third party for notifications as you're doing is problematic; probably even a deal breaker, for us. Though, I understand the desire to not use Drupal notifications, as they're among the most broken parts of the system and have a clumsy API and very weak solutions to common things like bounce processing and mailed replies.
Finally, I'm super impressed by how fast some experienced Drupal folks can whip something up. I struggle for days or weeks to do anything with it. It's such a large system, and it always seems to take so much code to do even basic stuff (and forms API in Drupal is deeply ugly and verbose). That's my roundabout away of congratulating you for making something awesome in a very short amount of time.
Edit: You mention forums as a feature of this. Is that the standard Drupal forum module or something else?
You may want to rethink this one as Mandrill screwed their customers big time recently. So I hope there is a way to add other services like sendgrid, mailgun etc.
I assume the authors didn't want to deal with the different "incoming webhooks" from different services, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement in theory.
For reference, here's a list of SMTP providers which support inbound email: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s...
Shortly after they closed down the Mandrill login they closed down our account for a TOS violation without warning. Outbound emails immediately stopped sending and we had to switch to Sendgrid ASAP. Their support didn't cave one bit and it seemed like they were actively trying to lose us as customers.
