Open source contact management software for communications & media

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[Music] it's your open source advocate and i'm back with another video and today i'm going to talk about free scout now free scout is touted as the best open source help desk and shared mailbox as we get into this you're going to see that it's really a shared mailbox with some pretty neat capabilities for replying for sending for doing some pretty cool stuff and making sure things are assigned to the right people really where the power of free scout is going to come from is the modules that's what's going to turn it in in my opinion more into a help desk type application now this is how they support the open source side of the project so these do cost a little bit of money but for instance right here if you wanted to add tags to things 6.99 you can add that module you've got it your setup let's say you want to do saved replies 4.99 what if you want to do workflows things that are automated through the system 14.99 now this could add up if you said man i want all of those things true you may want all these things but you have the option to start off with the free system that gives you the email capability where you can receive an email to a certain email address and you can set up more than one of these by the way you could have like support yourdomain.com help yourdomain.com desktop at yourmain.com premium support yourdomain.com and so on and really free scout helps sort that out and then you can assign which users can see which of those lists and which users get assigned any kind of requests that come in through those things and your users really just work through the browser so you'll see that when we go through that here in just a minute but they do have some really really cool things that you can add to the system through the module setup but thinking about like what really makes sense for what we get the most out of might be a really great way to think about how do i add modules to the system that makes sense how do i support the free scout project at the same time so i wanted to go through that real quick before we got into the but free scout looks really cool i'm about to show you guys how to set it up how to get it running how to get it running on your own domain and really very straightforward i hope you'll stick with me we'll get into it right after this i want to say thank you to all of my subscribers and all of my patrons over at patreon seriously you guys make this so worth it for me to do these videos every week i really truly enjoy it and i just can't say thank you enough if you're enjoying these videos subscribe let youtube know that i'm doing a good job by subscribing to the channel plus you'll get notified when i have new videos coming out and finally if you're enjoying what i'm doing give it a like just click on that thumbs up and that way youtube knows that you like it and they'll pass it along to other people that might enjoy my content as well i really appreciate it thank you again let's get started and the thing i think you guys like to see is the license so under github they've got the gnu affair general public license version three so this is a pretty standard gnu license it is an open source license just to be clear about what we're looking at again they have modules that are add-on modules that you can purchase but it is an open source system now what i've done is i've gone over to their docker free scout page so if you go to free scout and then docker free scout you can get this page and actually if we go back for just a second to the code on this page you'll see this little examples folder this is where i went so if you look down here they kind of tell you about what this is and how to do things and what things you might want to look at so it's good information to look at but we're going to go through this pretty quickly so they've got this examples page and then right down here they've got this docker compose with no proxy or docker compose which i assume has a proxy built into it so depending on how you're running the software and where you're running the software might depend on how you want to do this but since i'm going to run this from my home server and i run my own proxy inside my network i'm going to do this with no proxy so i'm just going to click on that we're going to see this nice docker compose file and it's really kind of already filled out so the easiest way to do this is to click on raw right here above your your compose files and then just do a control a to to select everything control c to copy and then we're just going to jump over to my test server here in the terminal and i've already got my docker folder open so what i like to do is i like to create a parent level docker folder and then inside of that i put my other folders that i want to run anything with from docker so in this case i'll make a new folder called mkdir and free scout is what we're going to call it and then we'll cd into free scout just like that and we'll just clear this out to give you a little bit more space i'll make this just a little bigger for the folks on the mobile devices and then we're going to do nano which is a text editor in the terminal you can use vi you can use vim you can use any any text editor you want i just use nano because it's built in and it's pretty simple to open up and use and then we're going to docker hyphen compose.yml now we're just going to paste in that text we copied while ago from github and then we're just going to write back to the top here in fact we'll save with ctrl o and just hit enter to save and then we'll go to the top just to make sure we don't lose it if anything happens here we're gonna go to the top and if you look right here now they've got a little funny space here so we'll just go out here and just kind of backspace that out and get that extra space out of the way i'm gonna start here at the top so it's a version two compose file it's going to go and grab the the free scout application from tired of it which is the are tired of it i believe but which is the person that made the free scout app here on docker they've got some ports maps now i don't want to use 80 so i'm going to put 82 52 and that's going to forward to port 80 on the on the container so anytime you want to change something about a docker container you can change the left side you just don't want to mess with the right side of the colon but this left side is your host port so on your host machine that's the port that's going to be listening in the in the case of free scout so that one we can change without any issues as we move down it's got this free scout db that's something that it's going to need to be linked to and that's an image that we're going to look at down below our container it's going to create from an image down below and then they've got some information for you on the volume so they say if you want to perform customizations of the source code and have access to it you need to uncomment this line and then comment out this line here but in this case i don't want to do that so i'm going to leave it like it is but just know that if you want to do that you need to take out this hashtag here like this and then put in a hashtag here that just changes those lines where you would have that set up in my case i'm just going to leave it as it is so i'm going to go back and re-comment that out make sure this one's uncommented and then down here the same way they say if you want to just keep the original source and add additional modules uncomment this line so if you want to add additional modules uncomment that line so it's probably a good idea to go ahead and uncomment that line we don't we don't may not add modules today but if you're going to add modules in the future you might want to go ahead and uncomment it right now then it's got the logs set up and then they've got these environment variables so this first one is container name free scout app that's fine we'll we'll leave that alone and then we've got free scout db that's the db name that's the database name that's fine there's nothing to change there now your db name is free scout again no problem but the db user you don't want to leave this user and password as default you want to change these you can leave free scout as the user honestly but you do want to give it a better password so in my case i'm going to change the user and the password i'm going to change this to brian and i'm going to change this to something a little stronger than that now you still should not copy my example here because it's still not a super strong password at least it's long it's got upper lower case numbers so we're doing pretty good there if you want to put symbols in i suggest putting quotation marks around the password if you're going to do that as we continue down you've got this thing that says site url now i'm going to take out this blank space again site url so we're just going to go and backspace this because we don't want this to be freescout.example.com in this case i'm going to make it the actual ip address of my server just for testing in the first place here you've got this admin email you can change this to whatever you want this is going to be kind of your login email so i'm going to say brian fix it delrio.com and then your admin password is set default as free scout i would suggest changing that again to something long and strong so we're going to do a long strong password one two three five four three two three something like that that's a nice long password that hopefully nobody would ever guess except you guys watching the video of course this is just for testing so it's going to be all different later as we continue on we've got enable ssl right now we're going to say false we're going to do that with our proxy in a little bit as we continue i'll kind of bring this up on the screen to make it a little easier to see so right here you can see uh display errors is set to false we don't want to see errors coming up on the screen if we're doing any kind of debugging we'd want to set that to true time zone is set to america vancouver by default which might be central time i don't remember so i'm gonna go ahead and set that to chicago because i know that's central u.s time for me and then restart always the next one is the freescot db remember that was mentioned way up here so that's what it's talking about it's talking about this container right here it's going to use the tired of it mariadb uh image so he's put his own radio image up there so as we continue down you've got this container name freescot db that's fine and then the volumes that it's setting up this is all fine i like the dot slash i appreciate that he did that because that keeps it in the folder where we're creating this docker compose file and it keeps everything in the free scout folder that's what i want i don't like it when they put things all over the computer this is just this is to me the setup already the way i like it now you guys feel free to change those paths to whatever you like on the left side don't mess with the right side but on the left side of the colon you can change that path to be whatever you want environment variables again root password password is probably a bad root password so again you should make this a really long strong password with number and complexity something like that okay and then on the db name free scout is fine but we changed our db user remember that we need to go here and make it match what we did up above so i put brian as my db user and then i'm gonna get rid of this password right here and i'm gonna just highlight and copy this password down below just like that so i make sure that they match exactly you don't want to have any mistakes there and then we've got another space that's just out of place we've got container name is freescoutdb again this is just a environment variable that's set so just make sure it matches what you're actually putting for your container name up here same with freescout app make sure it matches what you're actually putting for your container name if you change those things just make sure they match at the various places throughout the file that's the secret restart always great now he's got a db backup as well so we're going to go down here and kind of check out the db backup so he says free scout db backup and right here it's tired of it db backup that's fine and then he's got these links that's going to link to the free scout db which we expect now if you're linking it and you changed the name up here let's go back up for just a second if you change this name right here you need to change the reference up above and you need to change the reference right here where it has links make those match this right here should match this right here make sure that you're making those match okay as we go down volumes db backup to db backup again you can change the left side of the colon just don't mess with the right side of the colon and then as we go down you've got this container name free scout db backup that's fine just leave it as it is db host is free scout db again if you've changed that in the rest of the file make sure it matches here db type is mariadb db name free scout and the db user so again we're going to change this to what we made so in my case it was brian you change it to whatever user you made and then again we're just going to change this to the same password that we set before so we're just going to highlight this password and then paste it in down here to make sure it matches as we continue down we've got this db dump frequency this is 1440 seconds i'm guessing that's something like 15 minutes i don't know i'd have to do the math real quick but 1440 divided by 60 whatever that is that's how often it's going to do a db dump um the db dump begins at midnight i think is zero zero zero zero and then db cleanup time is uh 8640 so again whatever that comes out to so you can do the math there and then the compression is bzip so it's going to use bz for the compression and then md5 sums is true so it'll check md5 sums to make sure things are good and then it's set to restart always so we've got everything set we had to make a few little changes just for security so basically your db user your db password db user db password the db name we left alone everything else we left alone really we changed our time zone up here if we go up a little bit further again db user db password root password for your for your database continuing up right here we change the time zone and then again admin and our admin password for getting into the system we change the url just for testing we're going to use our internal ip address and then we'll set up our nginx proxy manager to proxy the stuff over but again db password db user make sure these things are all set exactly the same all the way through the file this is what's going to make everything function correctly so once we've got all that we're going to do ctrl o to save just double check things one more time here make sure we don't have any mistakes i think everything looks good we're going to do control x to exit and we're back to our terminal now we can do docker hyphen compose up we're going to do dash d and then ampersand ampersand docker hyphen compose logs dash f now you could just do docker compose up and stop right there and that would bring everything down bring down the images start the containers and then give you output in the terminal so you can see what's happening and kind of know when to check what's going on if you do it with dash d that means run it as a daemon so once it's finished it's gonna it's gonna show you done for all three images and containers and then it's gonna stop showing you anything in the terminal but it's running in the background as a daemon and then you can go and try to access your app what i like to do is add this second command after the ampersands and it says so it says start it up as a daemon but then show me the logs in the terminal so i can see what's going on so i like to run it this way because then when i quit the logs with control c later the app continues to run if i need to stop the app i can just do docker compose down to stop the app or dock post stop depending on how you want to do it so we're going to hit enter looks like i've already got them so it says they already exist and it gets everything started and it's already running so it's going to go out and it's going to do a few things so you can kind of watch the logs as they're running you can kind of see what he's doing here so he goes into some database setup sets up php which is kind of running what's the code is running to make this thing work tells you that it's starting nginx tells you that starting a few things that says please visit this address now we set a certain port so this address isn't going to work i may have to go back and set that port even in the url but let's just see how it goes so we will hit let's see just go to our browser and we'll jump over here we're going to go to 192.168.10.112. and that was 8252 is the port that i set now if you left it as 80 don't put that port in if you change the port something else use the one you set so it started to go but then it tried to switch us over to this so i do need to go put in that port or i need to use port 80 because it's trying to put a path on the end of the url so let me go set that port so what we'll do and this is a good thing to learn so we're just going to do go back to our command line here i'm going to do control c which stops the logs i'm going to do docker in fact we can just do nano docker hyphen compose.yaml we can edit it while it's running it's not going to hurt anything it doesn't change anything in the running app until we do the other command which is docker compose up dash d again so we're going to go down here until we find that url oh here it is right here and we're going to put on the port number and see if that helps let's just do that ctrl o and then control x and then we're going to do docker hyphen compose up dash d all right looks like it's done we'll do we'll just give it a second to make sure that it actually gets everything running because i didn't run the logs this time so we don't know if it's ready but it just took a few seconds while i go to get ready now yours may take longer because it has to pull down the images and everything and it runs through some migration steps for the database things like that so be patient if it's doing that we're going to switch back to the browser and we will try this again we'll just take out the login part there we go so now we've got free scout going it's working with the port number that we expect which is great and we've got everything ready to go now we used admin no we used my we used my user but we had a really long strong password so let's go grab that guy so we'll just tab back over to the command line and we'll do cat docker compose.yaml and we can just look for that admin password so if we scroll back up just a little bit you can see here's my admin user and then here's the admin password that i created so i can just copy that ctrl shift c and then we can go right back to our browser and we can paste that in and we can log in there we go so we've got free scout up and running but it's only running on our local network what if we want to have this thing running out there on the actual internet in that case we need a reverse proxy so we're going to jump into the reverse proxy and see how we get that set up i use a reverse proxy called nginx proxy manager it runs inside of docker which is really great and there's a lot of things you can do with it so it's really nginx it's just got a nice ui to it that lets me set things up through a user interface rather than through the command line and through a bunch of config files that's just my preferred way to work in this case so when i log in and if you go get it i have a script you can docker docker compose engine x proxy manager pertainer a lot of things with it it's a really fast simple script to use but i've got these proxy hosts so you can see i've got a ton of hosts here and i want to add a new host so i click into my hosts click on add a new proxy host and i want to create a subdomain for a domain that i already own so i'm going to create free scale that's the domain that i own i'm going to hit tab so it becomes this little chip and then i'm going to put in the ip address of my server and i'm going to put in the port number that that's running on i'm going to say websocket support block common exploits and publicly accessible so we're just going to hit save we've set up the basics we're not going to do ssl yet we're just going to hit save we're going to go here to our entry for free scout and we're going to click on go we're going to see if it comes up and it does but it changed it to this local address so this is what i was afraid of but now that we've got this set up we can actually go back into our docker compose so this is kind of the steps you set this up test it go set up your nginx proxy and make sure it works on your local network but it's going to show you this local address so now we want to do is go back into our docker compose file we're going to do nano docker dockercompose.yaml we're gonna go back down to this line that has the url and we're gonna change this to be that that url that we just gave it so i'm gonna say freescout.routm.org this is probably our first change we have to make we'll probably have to make one for the tls here in just a minute but let's just do control over it save and then control x for exit and we'll do docker compose up dash d that just makes it take that change and start the system running again with that change so give it just a second to say done wait about another 10 15 seconds shouldn't take very long and we're going to close that tab and we're going to go back over here and we'll click on our free scout domain again now if you look we've got free scout we've got the right domain we should be able to log in let's try brian at fix it delrio.com and we'll paste that password i hope that's still on my clipboard we'll find out yeah it is so now we're in free scout and we're using our url so we're doing pretty well next thing we're going to do we're going to go back to engine next proxy manager we're going to find our free scout line we're going to go to the to the right side click on the three dots click on edit we're going to go to our ssl tab right here we're going to say request a new certificate so if you click on this thing it says none initially it doesn't in my in mind it doesn't look like a drop down but it is click on request a new certificate click force ssl http 2 support and accept the let's encrypt terms of service and make sure you have your email in here we're going to hit save what this does is it tells let's encrypt hey challenge this domain freescout.robinhome.org in this case and see if you can reach it on port 80 and if you can issue me a certificate now sometimes i get this thing where i get this red bar and there's no error message in it i just click save again and see if it'll go if it can't get it it should give you an error message not just that red bar there it goes so once that window goes away on its own that generally means you've got your let's encrypt certificate and if you look right here at free scout you see now it says let's encrypt in the background so if we click it let's see if it'll go because my concern is that we haven't told it that we wanted to use tls so we're going to click and open and it's going to try to redirect us yeah so it's not expecting tls so you get this really messed up looking stuff where it doesn't scale everything correctly and this is just normal so we're going to go back into our docker compose file i think there's a couple of ways we can fix this let's try the easiest way first so let's do nano docker compose we're going to go right down to this line and we're going to change this from http to https we're just going to put an s right there i'm going to do ctrl o to save and then enter ctrl x to exit and one more time we'll do docker compose up dash d we'll give it just a minute to restart the container and pull those new values in and then we'll give it just another few seconds to get ready and then we'll come back in here and we'll just click on our url and this time it sells us bad gateway maybe it wasn't ready sometimes it'll give you that if it's not quite ready so let's just give it a second there we go when we refresh now we're kind of back where we expect to be and yeah we're still logged in even so we didn't even have to log in that time because it still got our cookie set for freescout the robbiehome.org but now we're hitting with https so that's great so as always the first thing you want to do is click around and see what's going on so first we've got our profile so we can go and set up our profile i'm an administrator but my first name isn't admin so i'll go and change this and i'm going to blow this up a little bit because it's even kind of small for me but there we go first name last name email address alternate emails if you have more than one email that you want to use you could put that in you could change your password if you want to job title so we're going to put it helper because i am not a pro phone number you can always put that in if you want to 555-555-5555 just like they say every phone number in california is most the 555-555-5555 i don't speak it super well but there you go and then utc is not my time zone so i do want to say i'm not sure why you set the time zone in the docker file but i'm going to do central time us 12 o'clock or 24 hour clock completely up to you which one you set 24 doesn't bother me at all and then browse for any kind of picture if you have one and then save the profile so everything saves successfully that's great i still see my information there that makes me feel good permissions so i'm set up as an administrator i should have all of the permissions i suppose and then notifications and then notify me by email through the browser android ios so if you have an app and you set it up to to get that i guess you could get some application notifications yeah so there's a free scout app in the android and ios store and if you get that and connect it to your server you should be able to get some kind of notifications through that app as well so you've got some options there for different notifications so you can see here that you know when there's a new conversation conversation is assigned to me so they call these things conversations which is interesting but you can set your notifications as a user and then new user so you can create a new user as well as you know being an admin you can do that if we go back to our manage option up here at the top left we've got settings mailboxes users modules translate logs and systems so let's click on system and kind of work our way up so the first thing is going to tell us is the app version 1.8.21 august 28 2022 is the date and time time zone is america chicago that's great we're running https our web server is engine x there's the version we're running php eight and we've got php upload max file size is set to two gigs and two gigs so we've got all these php extensions so we can see a lot of information about what's going on in the system here which is pretty great then you've got this tools tab here and you can clear the cache you can migrate your db you can log out users you can fetch emails you know three days those kind of things and really this is meant to be worked with an email system so let's look at the mailboxes set up so we've got this thing that says new mailbox it says create a mailbox so customers email this address for help egsupport domain.com so let's call this um free support at fixitdelrio.com and this mailbox name is free support we're going to click on create mailbox now the mailbox name is here the email address is here the aliases we don't really have any aliases but if you want to know what that's about you can just hover this thing you don't have to click it auto bcc so who else to include when things come into this mailbox from name is mailbox name so we can put username or custom name let's just call it mailbox name so the status after replying is pending default assignee it's automatically a sign of the person who replied if it's not assigned or else it could be anyone and then you can put the person replying basically kind of up to you how you set that up email header please reply above this line if you want that go for it check it otherwise uncheck it email signature this has some kind of rich text controls for creating your email signature but you can't see them on the screen that's crazy i'm not sure why um insert a variable so you can insert variables into your email signature i mean pretty cool that you can do that kind of stuff and then once you're ready um you hit save so here it says you need to set up receiving emails so you got to go to connection settings and then fetching emails so here we've got fetch from and it needs to be this email address on my mail server status is inactive it's imap that's fine we can put in the information so once you go through and set everything up for your imap connection to whatever you're going to use you'll get a message like this when you click on the check connection so we've done that which is great so we've got this free support mailbox we can kind of see all the settings right here so first it's got the edit the mailbox so you can see all of the information that we set up earlier again you can set up a signature if you want to you can tell them you know make sure to reply below this line there's really not a lot else there we can hit save everything should be good and then once you're ready you can go to connection settings and again sending emails you need to set that up as well so in this case i don't want to use phpmail i want to use smtp i have my own mail server so my smtp server i want to set that up so i'm going to do box.fixitdelrio.com and then my port in this case is 587 and my username is going to be free scout at fix it no not free scout three support what fixitdorio.com and then my password something nice and long and strong there encryption in this case my encryption is tls and free scout you know free support at fixdoria.com send test so uh we can send a test to ourself i guess and it says email pass so if you get something that says it didn't pass you feel like this is all correct make sure you clicked on save settings first because you do need to click on save settings and then send your test email so the email went we've got permissions as well so selected users have access to this mailbox so again if you have multiple users you'll want to go in and say yes they do know they don't that kind of thing so hide from the assign list edit mailbox permission auto reply so you have all these things you can set for each one of them and then basically your auto reply so enable auto reply or not so this is really a way for your team to communicate with your customers whenever you think about what this this application does so enabling auto reply and you can set up this auto reply if you want to not something i think i would use initially but as you get more busy you might want to set up on our reply like to tell them hey we did receive the email it may take us some time to get back to you but once we've got manage done you can go back over to mailbox and we can see we don't have anything unassigned yet so let's go and actually send an email over there so i'm going to create a new email here and i'm going to put it as free support at fix it delrio.com and we'll put in a subject of help with my desktop can't find the windows button so we're going to hit send now we'll give this a minute i don't know if it just auto refreshes or if it checks how it checks when it checks but we'll kind of give it a minute and then we'll refresh and see if it's there we can actually go to the other browser window that i opened up to log into that email account the first time so here's the free scout test email that they send there's the second one that i just sent so we're not seeing those showing up here in the user interface yet so let's just give it a minute so this is interesting while we're waiting for that other one to see if they'll come into our inbox there we can set up one to send i'm not sure why that field is so small but you can drag it out if you want to i guess and then it says free support and it's set as pending assigned to me and send let's see if it'll go please enter a message did i not enter a message okay let's see what we do here okay that one went so there's a separate box apparently below the first box that you need to type into that's interesting here it is right here in my email so it came in pretty quick and it's really small but we can zoom it up a bit here and you can see it says exactly what i said and it came from free support at fixadorial.com so very simple now if i reply let's see what happens and hit send so in theory they've this is listening on that email box there's unassigned one so here's the one help of my desktop can't find the windows button so that took you know two or three minutes to come in not bad and we can see here that i'm trying to run so this is working it's a simple back and forth messaging system uh pretty easy and we get some really interesting stuff here so we've got some extra things here we can do follow forward merge we can merge this to another thread that's going on which is pretty interesting and then we can print as well if we want to and then of course you've got your options up here of make a note so this would probably be an internal note i'm guessing so this is an internal note not sent to the client and then we can just do add note so now i can see this thing and then it's also under the mine because i own it at this point so we can see there's a couple of things going on and again i can just click on it and i can see some information so this is just an internal note this is not something that got sent to the client they give it a different background color so that you know that but you do have some really great options here for doing some different things so this is an interesting little piece of work then of course you can reply back to the person to say hey we've resolved your problem you know tell them what the what the fix is those kind of things so so really pretty useful for any kind of team team stuff where you want to have a whole team able to access certain messages and reply back and do things i think that's pretty cool so freescale yeah this is an interesting piece of software and again they have modules that you can purchase and add the modules on to you know increase the functionality of the system but really i mean even if you think of this as a very simple help desk ticketing system somebody emails you you get it you see it you see what they're asking for you can monitor those things and make them yours you can see the the unassigned stuff um really it's mine but it's unassigned i'm not sure why that is but if we go into it here i guess i can assign it let me there we go it goes out of the unassigned box now why it shows up two times i don't know oh yeah here we go i've got two different ones so i've got the one that i sent the message and they replied so here's that one thank you for the for the fast response so you can see there's none unassigned these are assigned to me but then you can have an entire team where you're signing out tickets they're handling things it's all going back and forth through email but really they just log into a web space it's a shared inbox system really that's it it's really pretty cool it makes it very simple and once you set it up it runs pretty smooth so i think this is really great this is free scout it's a team email system pretty great and gives you an opportunity to do a lot of back and forth with your customers and clients and really kind of get some information about what's going on and again if you look at those add-ons i think those are pretty cool they don't cost a ton it supports the open source side of the software and i think that's pretty great so getting feedback from your clients getting information about what your clients thought of the experience i think that's all really good stuff so i hope you guys enjoyed this if you did like subscribe tell your friends about it so then come along the journey with us and i'll talk to you next time [Music] you