Online customer support is not what it used to be. Thank goodness it's gotten better says SupportWizard, a division of Redwood City-based Integral Solutions.

The web-based helpdesk and customer support market company Wednesday released SupportWizard Enterprise Edition version 4.0. The improvements are designed to combine a company's e-mail, fax, and telephone communications with their customers into a single system.

"We have the product to a point where very few companies are still able to compete, even at much higher prices," says Integral Solutions VP of Business Development Bridget Conrad.

SupportWizard has caught the attention of companies like AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, Emeryville-based search engine AskJeeves, and San Jose-based network server AboveNet, who use the software to handle their external customer support, IT helpdesk, and development projects.

New to version 4.0 is an upgrade that lets customers search for existing answers and submit and track tickets directly over the web. There is also a new email management function that automatically routes notifications to specific departments and a customizable statistical report feature, which the company says takes about two minutes to use.

The new version runs on Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Solaris platforms. It is free for the first three users, and costs $800 per simultaneous user after that, with a maximum of $23,500 for unlimited users. It can also be leased offsite on an Integral Solutions server for about $350 per month (with 10 users), including all support, maintenance, and upgrades.