The advantage of an Open Source project is that usually there is a functioning community behind the project, consisting of people and organisations with similar interests.
Usually, a problem happens several times, or a missing functionality is noticed by several offices.

The forum is a good place to share problems and solutions, with many users helping each other.

Users just need to keep in mind that the forum is public, and they must never post confidential data from their database, and need to be careful with screenshots to illustrate their problem.
Therefore it might be good to have a first level support (User Help Desk) inside your organisation, and then a more technical minded person can report generalised issues to the public forum.

The forum is also a central point, where developers can answer issues and get motivated by the users. Because the source code is publicly available, a problem can sometimes be much clearer defined by a technical IT person of an organisation, and sometimes they can even prepare a solution for the problem.

Obviously, not all support can happen for free, and there is no guarantuee that someone will answer your question in a certain time. Therefore it might be good, depending on the size of your organisation, to have a more reliable technical support.

There are 2 options:

• Either you have your own technical staff that are able to contribute to the OpenPetra project and fix problems for you and to deal with your users.
• Or you can find a support and service provider in your area, that is prepared to help you. Usually with the growing popularity of an Open Source project there will be soon people who have a business based on supporting the Open Source software.