Technology has evolved at a rapid pace, and has enabled amateurs and professionals alike to utilize simple to use, open source software packages to streamline the way they do business, increase overall efficiency, and ultimately maximize profit. Help desk software has revolutionized the way businesses offer fast and effective support to their employees and customers. They do this by prioritizing and troubleshooting requests or inquiries that come in through the website, email, fax, or over the phone into a central integrated queue that in turn forwards inquiries to available help desk staff assigned to handle cases based on escalation level or complexity. The overall aim is to quickly identify and solve potential issues that may turn into time consuming, expensive problems in the future. The software is initially setup on a server, assigned specific portals from which to direct outgoing or incoming traffic (employee or customer inquiries), whether through the company's Intranet or the Internet for remote users. Each request is assigned a unique ticket or tracking number, and a priority level. If the case is not solved by the initial technician, it is given a higher priority and dispatched to the next escalation level queue. Furthermore this type of software has features that allows users to chat through an online connection, as well as enable the technician or help desk support person to directly remote access an employee's or customer's workstation and be in a position to effectively address the issue at hand. Additionally, programmers in open source programs are allowed to modify the source code to expand functionality, resolve technical glitches, and disable unused features. Constantly improving the software to accommodate the needs of the company's network is essential to achieving maximum efficiency and reducing as much as possible, lag time. It's important to keep in mind that users must invest in servers, modems, workstations, email servers, phone servers and broadband technology that are all preferably running on the same network operating system platform. The costs of assembling networks containing the above components and running on a Unix platform for example, can run in the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and require many hours of trial and error before achieving the desired result. Successful integration of email servers, phone systems (PBX), fax machines and network servers assigned to perform help desk functions is essential and can at times be a complicated task. Taking into account legacy software from old phone systems and attempting to reconcile with a network operating system through help desk software that acts as a central manager or coordinator, requires ongoing support and assistance from the vendor of such products.

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