· Barely one year after its launch, the open-source help desk and support system Zammad is coming of age: Zammad 2.0 brings the much-anticipated enterprise features and significant functional enhancements.
Barely one year after its launch, the open-source help desk and support system Zammad is on a great way: Zammad 2.0 brings the much-anticipated enterprise features and significant functional enhancements. These are, among others, the integration of LDAP directory services and Exchange environments, a considerably more powerful role management feature, enhanced Migration Wizards for importing data from OTRS and Zendesk as well as authentication via Microsoft Account. In short: Zammad is enterprise-ready now.
“Following the Zammad launch in October 2016 we had much positive feedback – from the community as well as from customers, and especially from organizations which have been looking for an OTRS alternative for a long time. Since then, we’ve continually been enhancing the functionality to fulfill their wishes and requirements”, says Martin Edenhofer, founder and managing director of Zammad GmbH. “With the new features, Zammad is now suited for small local companies and large international organizations alike.”
Zammad works with every modern web browser and provides all the functionality you’d expect from a state-of-the-art helpdesk and support system. What’s really special about it: The GUI has been created completely from scratch, making the solution truly intuitive to use – no expensive training needed. The modern Web App pools requests from multiple communication channels in one place, enabling service staff members or teams to receive service requests by email, phone, chat, Facebook, Telegram, and Twitter, and reply to them or pass tasks on to their colleagues. A modern dashboard provides a real-time view of the current state-of-affairs with all active tickets, their processing state, and the last actions taken. Clients can check the state of their request any time, too. Among the first clients of Zammad GmbH range the renowned Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, swissQprint, a Swiss vendor of large format printers, and one of the leading German publishing houses.
All users and permissions including names, departments, locations, login information, emails, and telephone numbers are automatically synchronized via LDAP. The setup can be done conveniently with LDAP Smart Setup. There’s no irksome manual adaptation of a special configuration file anymore. Zammad supports LDAP protocol V3, and thus Microsoft Active Directory.
All agents of an organization can use shared Exchange address books. Relevant contact data are automatically entered into the tickets. The feature also enables controlling the new Out Of Office Assistant via Exchange.
Instead of offering exactly three roles (customer, agent, and admin) as the current version does, Zammad 2.0 provides the option to freely define additional roles, along with permissions and group memberships. They can either be set-up manually or synchronized via the LDAP server’s central group administration.
Agents can enter the start and end times of their absence and define a stand-in. Typical events such as follow-up inquiries or escalations are automatically forwarded to the stand-in. All absences are serial, which means they get forwarded to the stand-in’s stand-in when more than one agent is absent.
Open-source software Zammad has provided an integrated Migration Assistant right from the start. Thus, it is very easy to migrate existing helpdesk and support systems from OTRS and Zendesk to Zammad.
Some more new features, we’ve been asked for a lot
“We wanted to replace our helpdesk system OTRS in order to provide our staff members and clients with an easier support experience”, says Solvig van Severen, Senior Product Manager at the renowned German fashion magazine burda style. “Introducing Zammad was a complete success, not just because the processing times for tickets and with them the time our customers have to wait for an answer have been cut significantly.”
“As we had been looking for a helpdesk solution for quite a while, we followed Zammad with great interest right from the start ”, says Mathias Buschor, Leader Marketing Services at the renowned Swiss vendor of large format printers swissQprint. “We wanted to provide our staff members and clients with a support system which is not only a lot easier to handle but which could be integrated into our infrastructure without huge efforts as well. In view of our current accelerated international expansion on several continents, we especially profit from the LDAP integration and the new permission and role management. The new features and high innovation rate of Zammad have caused significantly higher satisfaction levels for all users and our administrators as well, we are absolutely delighted.”
Zammad 2.0 is available from now on. The open-source software can be installed completely free of charge on your own servers. The source code, as well as installation packages for CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, and Docker container, are available to download.
Alternatively, there is the Cloud solution, which is identical in scope and functions and immediately ready for use. Prices range from 5 to 26 Euros per agent and month, depending on the chosen package and payment method. The help desk and support system is solely hosted in German data centers and can be provided with an optional ISO27001 certification as well. Zammad offers various support packages for clients wishing to run the software on their own servers. Prices start at 2,299 Euros/year.
The open-source software launched in October 2016 is based on state-of-the-art web technologies such as WebApp/HTML5, WebSockets or REST in the frontend, and relies on Ruby on Rails for the backend. Thanks to its complete REST-API, Zammad can be implemented seamlessly in existing system environments. Moreover, solutions such as Slack, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, sipgate.io, GitHub, GitLab, Nagios, and Icinga can be integrated with Zammad. Authentication has been extended to Access Token and OAuth2.
The source code is owned by “Zammad Stiftung” (Zammad Foundation) and is licensed under GNU AGPLv3. It is available on GitHub and can be used and developed further free of charge. Please read more information on the Zammad Foundation.
Zammad is a help desk and support system for small and large companies and organizations – the open-source software can be downloaded free of charge. The Zammad user interface was developed in close cooperation with the award-winning UI experts from Zeughaus and strictly breaks with old traditions. The ticket system is following the familiar use of web browsers and smartphones and is easy to use even for people with little technical experience.
Behind the project is a team of experienced developers around Martin Edenhofer, who, among other things, started the successful ticket system OTRS in 2001.