osTicket Help Desk

I wanted to understand a help desk the way the people running one do, not from a slide, but from standing up the whole stack and working real tickets through it.

I deployed osTicket v1.18 on Windows with XAMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and configured a live email-to-ticket pipeline over IMAP/SMTP. Then I modeled an org: 2 departments, 4 role-based agents, 5 help topics, and 3 SLA tiers (SEV-1/2/3) with defined escalation paths.

Ten tickets resolved end-to-end with documented triage and escalation, a working help desk and, more importantly, a real feel for the SLAs and handoffs that keep support sane.