Slashdot Mirror

Try "Request Tracker" http://www.bestpractical.com/rt Easy to set up, scriptable, both web and email interface.

Or do a search on freshmeat for "ticket system" or something along the lines.

RT: Request Tracker is pretty good.

My own current solution on my personal Web site involves doing a more limited version of that using PHP. I'm debating whether I want to try to move it to a Real Web Framework or not.

If you like Perl, you might be interested in Jifty, a new open-source Perl-based Web framework. It's only a "developer release" right now (ie. don't use it to run your banking site), but it's pretty useable all the same. It's got a lot of the shiny AJAX stuff people have come to expect, and it makes setting basic things up ridiculously easy, but it's also got a solid core foundation for database stuff. It's a pretty spiffy framework.

(Disclaimer: I work for Best Practical Solutions, the company that started Jifty.)

Seaside is technically superior, it uses continuations to mantain state and this make it really transparent...

If you want a continuations-based open-source Web framework built on top of a stable, popular, well-tested language, you might check out Jifty, a Perl Web framework. Wait a second, you say -- Perl doesn't have continuations! This is true. Perl doesn't have continuations. Jifty does. It's only a "developer release" right now, but it's surprisingly useable all the same.

(Disclaimer: I work for Best Practical Solutions, the company behind Jifty. Yeah, yeah, shameless self-promotion and all that. It's a spiffy framework, and it's open-source.)

Maybe instead of Remedy you should use something like Request Tracker - it's web-based, clean interface, and completely open.

A significant set of comments here approach this problem from the server and sysadmin side. None of them approach the problem from the user interface or usability side. How can your implementation be successfull if your users (up to 1 million) are unhappy with the way they are required to use it, or it's unusable to them (very common for those not technically inclined as you are almost certainly to have with that many email accounts)

First you need to determine how the users will access their email, and how they are going to use it. Will this be webmail, client app, PDA, etc.

Then you need to determine what the user requirements are:

• Calendaring support (this will be nasty if application integration is required)
• Shared contacts
• Webmail (and what browsers will be used)
• SSL/TLS
• SMTP Authentication
• Roaming users (anyone not on the intranet)
• IMAP, IMAPS
• POP3, POP3S

Also what applications they will be using to connect to this system such as: emacs, pine, mutt, thunderbird, outlook express, MS outlook, opera, evolution, mail.app, etc.
If possible try to enforce a policy restricting the use of email clients to a small subset, but do however remember that there may be users on Mac's, **nix PC's, Windows PCs, and potential others. (NB: Avoid allowing Outlook Express if you wish to use IMAP)

Determine your security requirements for the mail system. Is everyone required to connect using SSL encrypted links?

Determine your minimum service levels required (99.9% uptime or higher, do note that every 9 beyond the first 3 can be expected to double the cost of the solution)

Determine support levels for hardware with respect to warranty, part availability, technician availability etc.

Determine backup requirements, are you required to be able to restore individual emails, individual mailboxes, all mailboxes, and how many levels of backups are required? Do you need to be able to restore emails deleted 4 months ago

Quota requirements, are there limits on the size of a persons mailbox, can this be customized, are there limits on the size of an email a user can send, and the same for receiving. Will you allow a user to store 2+GB of email on your system?

Determine other legal requirements, such as a requirement to be able to retrieve any email sent through the system for auditing/legal purposes

Determine effectiveness of antivirus filtering and how many levels of antivirus filtering will you require to ensure robustness and the correct level of user protection?

Determine level of spam filtering required (generic, user specifiable, with headers, without headers,

Do you require mailinglist or distribution list requirements (mailman?)

How many physical sites will be accessing this mail system (one office? multiple branches)

Will you be requiring a support ticketing system? (example: RT from http://www.bestpractical.com/)

Will users be able to customize their mail settings (enable/disable bayesian spam filtering, custom antispam rules, setting of spam thresholds, autoresponder messages, out of office replies, disable/enable spam filtering, disable/enable antivirus filtering)

What level of redundancy are you required to have? Do you need to provide redundant systems even if one datacentre is disconnected (somehow)
ie. main datacentre you use in the UK is disconnected for some reason outside your control, do your roaming users in the UK still need to be able to access their email without any loss through an alternative backup mail system in the US?

Can your users be split up into multiple sub-domains? ie. production, hr, finance, lists, support, technical, development, etc. And will they notice or can you hide it from the user with a simple server-side rewrite.

How are you going to measure the performance of the system once in place. wrt disk space, amount of connections, upti

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

You should check out RTx::AssetTracker, an asset management extension to RT. Like RT, you can easily create custom fields to hold your router configs, firmware versions, etc.

Demo here.

For a small to medium sized company, being able to run an in-house customized ticketing and bug tracking system using cvs/svn, RT and bugzilla makes sense to me due to the dynamic nature of the projects and processes.

I have used ticket tracking software including Siebel, Clarify, Vantive and others and cannot speak highly enough about RT. It works. It's free. If you need help or a custom setup for a larger enterprize, it's available - not required.

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

*Ahem*. RT does not use PHP; it's a mod_perl (and specifically, a Mason) application.

Quoting from RT's feature list page:

• RT runs great on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and most other flavors of Unix. End users have contributed a port to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
• RT stores all its data inside an SQL database, so you can use Crystal Reports and similar tools to generate precise reports. Right now, you can deploy on MySQL 4, PostgreSQL 7.3 or Oracle 9i. Best Practical is working to bring support for Sybase and Informix to RT as well.
• RT uses Apache's mod_perl interpreter or the FastCGI protocol, so you get blazing fast performance no matter what web server you choose.

That said, RT is a fantastic tool. I've used it at the last two jobs I've worked at, and if it's not there next time I switch jobs, I expect to introduce it. It can be a bit fiddly to get installed, as it depends on a couple of dozen CPAN modules, but the Wiki documentations's generic and specific installation guides try to make this as painless as possible, and if you get stuck there's always the mailing lists and paid support. And once RT is up and running, it's stable, versatile, flexible, adaptable, and just all around a great tool for managing a collection of on-going tasks.

If it's good enough for NASA, Merrill Lynch, DynDNS, Perl (it's the bug tracker for the Perl language), and others, then chances are it's probably good enough for you too. :-)

I've heard decent things about RT. Actually, I'd probably be using it right now, except we needed more of a CALL-tracking system rather than a work-ticket tracker.

Well, it can be ugly at times and there are certainly some rough edges, but Request Tracker will probably do the trick.

Mind you, you'll probably need a Linux or BSD server running Apache, PHP, and an SQL engine (MySQL or PostgreSQL, we use Postgres).

Look at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/.

Jesse Vincents who took req and ran with it to develop RT.

Thank you, sir.

You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.

What might help is a project management infrastructure to assist in doing these things.

For design documentation and documentation in general you need a rudimentary content management system. It can be as simple as document repository under version control.

For e-mails to track changes and record on-going discussions and debate, use a change management system like Request Tracker or a threaded discussion group program with email notification.

Gforge, Tudos and trac are complete systems for managing development.

Having project management infrastructure in place at all times means that you can turn anything that requires more then, say, one person working two days, into a formal project with minimal overhead.

These systems reduce the number of face-to-face meetings that eat into development time and at the same time improve communication. The result is that there can be a measurable improvement in even the smallest project. Perhaps, especially in the smallest projects.

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users. It is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organizations worldwide.

I have created a Windows port of RT, and have been maintaining it for two years now, selling support contracts for a living, as well as developing RT-Foundry, a project similar to GForge/Trac, on top of RT.

The RT-Win32 installer comes with its own Apache2, MySQL4.1, Perl 5.8.6 and Fetchmail, so you'd not need any other existing SQL server to set it up. I'd be happy if you'd give it a try. :)

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users. It is used by Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and development organizations worldwide.

I have created a Windows port of RT, and have been maintaining it for two years now, selling support contracts for a living, as well as developing RT-Foundry, a project similar to GForge/Trac, on top of RT.

The RT-Win32 installer comes with its own Apache2, MySQL4.1, Perl 5.8.6 and Fetchmail, so you'd not need any other existing SQL server to set it up. I'd be happy if you'd give it a try. :)

We use RT for a lot of things. Not sure what you're trying to accomplish with the P.O. thing, but if it's a workflow (request/approve/deny) then RT can do it.

If you're trying to just print out PO forms then open office or any of the other free spreadsheet programs can do that sort of thing.

All done in Perl, handles both e-mail and web-based ticket creation, easy to hack on to change.

RequestTracker

It's free (and Free), has commercial support if you need it, very customizable, if a little difficult to set up. But once up and running, it's been great for our company (3 people on support).

RT Home page

you mean this? http://www.bestpractical.com/rtfm/

Ticket app: http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

FAQ Manager: http://www.bestpractical.com/rtfm/

Ticket app: http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

FAQ Manager: http://www.bestpractical.com/rtfm/

I'd recommend RT from Best Practical. I use it with a Postgres backend and Apache/Sendmail on the front-end, and it works beautifully. It does everything we (and you, it sounds like) need it to do, with plenty of added flexibility if you need it. Check it out.

I'd recommend RT from Best Practical. I use it with a Postgres backend and Apache/Sendmail on the front-end, and it works beautifully. It does everything we (and you, it sounds like) need it to do, with plenty of added flexibility if you need it. Check it out.

I have been using Request Tracker for a while now and I love it, and so does my support staff and customers. It is very robust and flexible. I use Apache with mod_perl, SSL and a MySQL database, and sendmail for the mail interface. You might hit a few bumps during setup, but you should be able to work through them. There are a lot of good docs out there which walk you through the entire setup. If you haven't looked at it you should. Everything is free except the hardware and time. They also have RTFM (RT FAQ Manager) which is an addon to RT and can help you manage company wide knowledge.

If you need a serious customer support email + web based issue/ticket tracking and management system then you need to check out Request Tracker.

Of course, if your rich, look into HEAT.. it does some damn amazing things...

I'm not sure what specific purpose you're aiming for, but Best Practical's RT has been extremely useful for us. I'm part of a two-member sysadmin team that should be four, and RT really has been wonderful way to keep two overworked sysadmins organized.

I'm not sure what specific purpose you're aiming for, but Best Practical's RT has been extremely useful for us. I'm part of a two-member sysadmin team that should be four, and RT really has been wonderful way to keep two overworked sysadmins organized.

I'm a big fan of the web-based software RequestTracker, affectionately known as RT.

It is similar to Bugzilla, except it's not software bug oriented so much as "Stuff To Do" oriented. It has a simple email gateway, it keeps track of absolutely everything, it allows you to add custom fields quite easily, it changes priorities of your events over time, and it allows you to keep track of how much time you've spent on various projects. Around my office, it's pretty key.

Take a look at this for an alternative to Goldmine.

You didn't cite any open-source helpdesk software, so I'll just mention RT.

Request Tracker
http://www.bestpractical.com/

We use RT, Request Tracker, from Best Practical. (Software here.)

It's web based, takes requests in via email, allows different people to get assigned to issues, and allows issues to be assigned to different groups (queues) and different people.

The trick to things is to remove the concept of bug or problem from your approach -- everything is an issue to address (thus a request, by RT's model), and you can build the flow you need to manage your requests.

Davae

As for phone or in-person requests, all you need is the discipline to capture the request in RT, or perhaps a policy that all requests must be entered into the system either via the web interface or by e-mail. Perhaps my only complaint with RT is that it's somewhat cumbersome to set up, but the instructions will take you step by step, just be sure to follow them closely.