SchoolSupport Help Desk is free "open source" software distributed under the GNU General Public License developed by the Free Software Foundation. It was derived by Hunter Ellinger from Liberum Help Desk, a general-purpose help-desk support system developed and put under the GPL by Doug Luxem. Adaptation to the needs of academic administrators and faculty trying to help students with problems they encounter at college was coordinated as a sabbatical project by Dr. Mary Parker of Austin Community College; further development has been overseen by her and David Fonken (ACC Math/Science Dean). This prototype system was developed in Fall 2001 and operationally tested in Spring 2002.

The goal of the SchoolSupport Help Desk project is to make it easier for colleges to quickly provide helpful and consistent information to students, even when a school is large, complex, and geographically dispersed. (For example, Austin Community College, the beta-test school, serves over 30,000 credit students on six full campuses and numerous teaching sites, plus distance-learning classes, and has several dozen academic departments). The software is configurable to different college settings and organizational structures.

Replies to student requests are made through the SchoolSupport Help Desk by participating members of the school's administration, faculty, and staff. Authors of replies are able, when they so choose, to draw on the replies made by others to similar questions, promoting consistency and exchange of ideas, and making good use of specialized knowledge in different problem areas. Much of the information reflected in the faculty and staff replies is collected in the site's Frequently Asked Questions pages, which provide a steadily-developing body of consistent information that is instantly available to students at all times.

As with all GPL software, improvements in SchoolSupport Help Desk made to better serve ACC students will also be freely available to other schools. Note that SchoolSupport Help Desk comes with absolutely no warranty -- it is the responsiblity of users to decide if it meets their needs. Institutions hosting a SchoolSupport Help Desk site are free to make any changes to the source code they desire in order to adapt it to their needs or requirements, but such changes also must be made freely available to others under the GPL.

Technical support for the SchoolSupport Help Desk system is being donated during the beta-test period by Exemplar Technologies (hosting) and Hunter Ellinger (programming). Technical questions or comments should be directed to hunter@schoolsupport.net.