As its name suggests, Free Help Desk is a completely free, yet open source web-based application implemented in PHP and designed from the ground up to act as a powerful and simple helpdesk software solution for small and medium-sized businesses.

The software can be used in any organization that are looking into solutions for improving their customer service, as well as to lower the costs of information technology and provide faster response times to their clients.

Being a Web App, Free Help Desk needs to be deployed on a web server, such as Apache or nginx, that runs on top of a GNU/Linux operating system and supports PHP 5.3 or later, as well as MySQL 5 or higher.

To install it, simply download the latest version of the software from its official website (see the homepage link at the end of the article) or through Softpedia, save the archive somewhere on your computer, and unpack it using an archive manager utility.

Then, open a FTP client application and connect to your web server, create a folder (e.g. myhelpdesk) and upload all the files from the extracted archive to the newly created folder on your web server. Then, open a web browser and access the location of the ‘myhelpdesk’ folder (e.g. http://localhost/myhelpdesk) and follow the on-screen instructions.

Being designed as a web-based application, Free Help Desk can be used on any operating systems, including all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as the BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows OSes.

It runs through a web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari or Chromium. The software has been successfully tested on 32-bit and 64-bit computers.