Hey @kmagness,I run two instances in house where I work. One is for roughly 350 employees, and the other is for the State of NH. I'm going to split out your "questions" and try to give you more information so that you can make a better informed decision. If I miss something, or you would like more clarification please feel free to ask here or PM me directly.One question we have is if we can have the 24/7 support of the Standard or premium paid version, but run the program locally on our server like the free version.
Yes you can. Well presuming that you have the technical staff to do so. :) The free download version does not have any limitations on it. It's the same as the hosted version.I didn't see much information on a built in knowledge base,
There is a built in kb/faq system. You can have categories, public and private. It supports rich text (html)Customer satisfaction surveys are another feature, I saw a post on here to link externally for surveys on ticket experience, is there any way to do this with features in the program?
No. osTicket does not have a customer satisfaction / survey features at this time. It is also not on the roadmap for future implementation. You may be able to talk to the folks at professional support or the customization services and they can implement this type of feature for you.Search functions weren't shown much in the feature page, and while this is an obvious "easy to get right" feature, our current ticket system has an awful search function that has no ability to be specific in what we want to look for, so any information on that would be wonderful.osTicket has a search and advanced search feature. You can also search through the content that is contained in any custom fields that you add. Here is a screen shot of advanced search to give you a better idea. Last, is there a way to trial this program without configuring on a server completely, so we can save time on proof of concept for superiors.
Yes there is! The hosted osticket version is free to try. You can find more information about it here: Support System: Pricing. I've done their trial but host internally (and have for years).The one feature we may have to hold off until full implementation is LDAP and Active Directory integration, which I see is coming very soon.
Version 1.8.1 will indeed include a plugin for LDAP/AD authentication for Staff accounts only. Client authentication will probably be in the next release after that. So if you need Client accounts sooner once again you can talk to the customization services folks, or wait.Like I said before if you have more questions feel free to post here or PM me directly. :) It might take me a couple days to get back to you depending on when you post as I generally try not to troll the forums on the weekends.