Freescout: Required Features

[freescout-helpdesk]

Please list in this issue those features which are currently missing FreeScout, features without which you can not start using FreeScout in your projects.

[eric241]

Allow support agents to subscribe themselves or others to tickets @ issue 342

[eric241]

Ability to create departments (similar to the mailbox feature), but without the need of having separate email addresses

[eric241]

Ability to tag customers. Currently only conversations can be tagged.

[eric241]

Ability to set reminders for conversations and make the conversations' title bold and appear first on the listing when the reminder date/time passed.

[foliovision]

I find Eric is laying it on a bit thick here. We ourselves do need the subscription features but are able to work even without it (inconvenient, it means assigning tickets back and forth to one another to get feedback as the @name functionality does not work reliably).

In particular I would take exception to the requirement of departments outside of mailboxes. That's yet another layer of organisation on top of what is a pretty flat and clear structure. It's pushing Freescout in the direction of Enterprise software. It's almost impossible to maintain or improve enterprise-level software with its sophisticated permissions without huge revenue streams. Moreover, those organisational schemes tend to slow down performance and introduce urgent bugs, i.e. if you have enterprise level permissions, they better work reliably as managers will be counting on their privacy at that point.

Tagging customers: while tagging is a handy workflow it's far from essential. Assigning tickets to one another, adding notes is essential. Tagging is a luxury. Tagging is definitely preferable to an additional layer of departmental organisation and permissions, as if tags fail or suffer the inevitable bugs for even a few weeks at a time, it's not a showstopper but just an inconvenience.

Reminders would be handy but reminders could easily be added to a calendar (every business has a working calendar at this point right?) and linked to the Freescout ticket. Reminders unlike departments are very useful feature for small businesses (the companies inclined to actually use and value a solution like Freescout). But again, I'd classify reminders in the luxury category and more as a nice to have than a requirement.

What is bothering me right now are issues with reliability (the problem of incorrect coding of spam emails killing a mailbox is gone thank heavens). Here's some examples:

• starred emails cannot be unstarred (argh!!)
• draft emails sometimes cannot be made undraft or deleted (i.e. they are invincible and leave bad information there, five draft emails which shouldn't be there)
• @name is extremely unreliable in terms of sending notifications
• fetch errors remain huge: fortunately they usually work themselves out now eventually but it's extremely worrying to get a fifty-line daily report of errors even when SSL is turned off (Freescout handily is on the same server as the mailboxes so SSL is not required)

My laundrylist is a pretty long one but it's indicative that bug fixes to core issues are more important than new complex features (which may cripple Freescout as the core will become too complex to troubleshoot as open source).

I've paid bounties and am paying $50/month via Patreon and will on occasion write detailed feature requests or bug reports, so I am really backing Freescout to succeed. We use Freescout every day in production. I'd like to see those dropping in "requirements", showing some commitment to the project. As the maintainer of about a dozen open-source projects, I've noticed that those with the highest requirements are often those least inclined to support our work.

Thanks again for all your hard work building an extraordinary piece of open source software. Freescout is the only open source helpdesk written in PHP and simple enough to administer for a small business. The other open source solutions are either hideous and ugly or so overwrought that installing and maintaining a working install would almost require hiring another server admin with specialised knowledge of additional programming languages or frameworks.

[freescout-helpdesk]

@name is extremely unreliable in terms of sending notifications

This is not implemented yet.

starred emails cannot be unstarred (argh!!)

Will be fixed in the next release. Better to create separate issues for each bug.

[foliovision]

Thanks for the quick update. @name appears somewhere in the documentation I believe. If that's the case the documentation should be revised not to advertise a notification feature. @name is far more urgent than even subscription to tickets. A _simple_ and fast ticket subscription model could almost replace @name so take your pick. Sending you a screenshot for that interface is my top priority right now in terms of Freescout.

There's no separate issues yet, as before filing a bug report:

• I first have to establish consistent and repeatable behaviour
• I then should search carefully for a similar bug

and only then report it. Detailed bug reports for all Freescout issues are on my own New Year's list.

[sam-suresh]

1. Simple Reports (Date Range selector, Time taken for the first reply, Time taken to set Closed)

[dseegers]

Well, another one I did not find was the possibility to delete the ticket or whatever you call it.
You can push it to the bin, but you don't have the possibility to delete it completely (included the attachments). So let's say someone has sent a request for a password reset or something with personal data in it and this ticket must be removed. It can be (only as admin)

[freescout-helpdesk]

Closing this. Further discussion please continue in corresponding issues. 'Bump' existing issues if needed.