I'm a firm believer in providing a great customer support experience to your customers, so when I needed a way to manage customer requests for WhisperGifts, I began putting together an in-house solution.

There are a number of great open-source helpdesk packages available, however most of them are written in PHP which is not installed on my server for various reasons. This caused me to begin to write one in my framework of choice, Django.

The website for Jutda Helpdesk can be found at www.jutdahelpdesk.com, which includes documentation and links to the Google Code Page which is used for bug tracking and version control.

Some of the features include: Full e-mail integration (it can pick up e-mails from your POP3 or IMAP mailboxes) Sends HTML & plain-text e-mails (templates controlled via admin screen) Multiple ticket queues, to use for different products or customer groups Pre-set replies for common ticket responses Built-in reporting & statistics Automatic ticket escalation with the ability to ignore weekends & public holidays * Web-based API to allow 3rd party software integration

A full demo is available online where you can try out the features and get a feeling for what it's capable of.

There's still a little bit of work that needs to be done, but it's at a stage where you can use it publicly. I am using it already to manage support calls for Jutda Products including WhisperGifts and it hasn't given me any major grief so far.

If you want to contribute to the project, please submit it via Google Code and I'll review it. I'd also love to hear how you're using Jutda Helpdesk - I know there are at least a few installations out there from people who have found it via Google, so let me know and I'll give you a shout-out :)