ticketing software

Hey,

I'm sorry if this is a bit off topic but I was hoping to get some feedbacks on which ticketing software (web-based are ok) out there are easy to use and fairly cost effective. I just started at a small company and we're trying to grow the I.T. department and are looking for a ticketing software to better track the issues that are flowing in. At my previous employment, they were using HP openview but I think that's a bit of an over kill at this place since we don't have a helpdesk department. Right now all calls/issues are mostly sent to us via email and sometimes via phone calls. I'm looking for something that will be easy to use/easy to set up and fairly cost effective and also a web-based program. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Our company went with IBM Maximo Service Request Manager and let me tell you it's been one headache after another. You likely won't be considering it though since you say your outfit's pretty small (we handle around 1k field engineers at my branch and plenty more customers).

A while ago I looked up some open source options. Sorry I don't have the list anymore, but I know there are a handful of web-based ticketing apps which people do use. I think the search terms I used included looking out for PHP/MySQL stuff. It should be fairly easy to snag a web dev who works with those or even learn it yourself, assuming you've got someone with experience with web development.

Edit:
From what I've seen most of them take input via a form in a browser; assuming you don't want to bother your customers with learning how to fill these up, you just need to train someone to convert incoming emails/calls into tickets. I remember being fairly impressed with how straightforward they were, and if you aren't handling a large volume of calls (I take it "calls per second" isn't a metric you're using) a trained person can actually handle quite a fair number of tickets himself.