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Handling the General e-Mail in an Organization?
cheezycrust asks: "I'm part of a small organisation (four staff members, seven board members), and we get a lot of mail on our info@... email-address. Some of the questions are complex, and require input from several staff and/or board members. I'm looking for a way to track and handle these messages. It seems to be a combination of a bug tracking and a groupware system. It should be very simple to use, be platform-friendly (Windows, Mac, Pocket PC), and work on- and off-line (if I want to handle 50 messages on a train ride, this should be possible). I have a preference for free software, but the administration of the software itself should not take too much time. What solutions have you used in your organisation?"
Know it'll be shot down here, but...
Might only be platform independent on the client side, but is the best thing for this, giving access to mailboxes to those who need it.
At my last place of employment we had support emails sent directly to FogBugz. After that they were organized by priority and severity, dupe checked, and assigned to a developer to resolve. You should probably be able do that with any bug tracking software.
I believe FogBugz is exactly what you need.
I absolustly adore Basecamp, which is a hosted project management system.
It's mantra is "communication", so it's centered around posts and messages. But you can also set milestones and check off to-do's.
It's really super-simple and flexible for different purposes. It's like the "Mac" of project management. Two fields to create a new project. One field to create a client. Three or four fields to add a new person on your team. Compare that with some other groupware or PM systems that have screenfuls of crap you have to fill out and complicated workflows that you just give up on after a week.
It doesn't exactly handle your PocketPC (though they just added a mobile interface to their other project, backpackit.com, so they might add it to basecamp.. they are very open to user suggestions).
And then offline thing doesn't seem like a big deal... just use text files and then upload/send them when get online?? However the basecamp folks ARE planning on letting you use email to create and respond messages someday, so that's another plus. You could just compose your messages on the train and then send them in.
But do check out basecamp.
Keep it simple. I know some tracking systems, OSS and commercial, and all lack of offline mode. So maybe simple email is the way to go.
...
Our traking system we use atm sends emails i can read on the road. If it's on the queue where i'm the only one who's working on that i prepare the answer and send it later with the system (to be honest i don't know if the system can handle mails i send to it directly, but i know some can do that).
Get someone who will sort the mails for you. Depends on the amount of mail you can use the one for several other tasks.
Make several mailinglist for topics/staff who will handle the mail. Write a howto like this:
- don't answer mails on a personal mailinglist, but give comments if you want/can.
- if you want to answer a mail on a not personal mailinglist, send a mail to the mailinglist with LOCKED:
- if you answered the mail, bcc: it to the list so everbody knows it is answered and maybe can reuse it.
- if after X days no answer is on the list, even it's locked, somebody else should take care of the mail.
- use a mailer with proper threading!
you can combine it with a tracking system if you want, but email is the key!
Possible Problems:
- the board members a to stupid to handle email
- it works only proper if everbody takes care of the rules
- if you are on the road, somebody will answer a mail which you are doing at the same time. This is the disadvantage of offline, i don't think a commercial super tricky software can prevent this
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
I need to second the AC parent post.
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.
RT has been a godsend for our company. Before I installed it, sales-at-ourcompany.com was getting deluged with e-mail from customers and spammers. Customers' questions were getting ignored and they were getting pissed. Our customer service reps were frustrated and the lack of coordination resulted in multiple replies to customers' questions.
Enter RT. It took me about 45 minutes to get it up and running and to master the basics. An hour later, I had all my reps trained on it and answering questions. Later that afternoon, I wrote a simple web interface for customers to contact us with. I created seperate queues for Customer Service, Billing, and Technical Support and the web interface routed questions to these queues appropriately.
But it gets better...I quickly discovered that RT is useful for much more than customer service. Our software development team uses it to keep track of bugs. The eBay team uses it to track auction questions and payment problems. Even the guys on our brick-and-mortar sales floor use it to keep track of special orders.
It's also super-customizable. It's written using Mason, which happens to be what I used to build all of our websites. When a customer creates a support ticket, the rep viewing his ticket sees a pane containing the customer's entire order history, including the status and FedEx tracking numbers for each order.
Best of luck,
Chris
He doesn't want the system to store data centrally; it should be P2P like BitKeeper. But it has to be Free, because otherwise it's like that Java trap thingy RMS is always talking about. They run Slackware, so they need to be able to compile it themselves (no dpkg's or rpm's, thank you very much!). And they're using it to organize info@we-steal-music.net, so there's gotta be a way to filter email from IP addresses belonging to the RIAA.
Is that enough of a challenge for you?
Exchange is anything but cross-platform. You can't therefore use it in the context of the original post.
There are maintenance tools, but they aren't documented. Without source code or documentation, you can be very much in the dark.
See my journal, I write things there
sounds like you need a workflow system.
If you don't mind proprietary systems you might consider Lotus Workplace (based on websphere and DB2).
It has advanced workflow systems and of course everything essential to groupware.
Ontop of that the Workplace product line has clients for Linux, Mac and Win32.
It also has replication features so you can have your data with you when traveling, and syncing the next time you go online.
With their express offerings IBM has made the product relatively affordable too for a small organization as yours.
Also you wont be betatesting technology since both the websphere and lotus side is pretty tested by now.
Otherwise you should look at workflow systems with replication - I'm not really sure if bug tracking systems are enough for the problem you described.
Maybe Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/ can do the trick for you. It's free and it has Email integration. Also I think SuSE had a System like that based on a News Server which also means platform independent offline support.
http://otrs.org/
Sounds like you got too many Chiefs and not enough Indians in that company.
2 of the three I recommend have already been mentioned. RT and Fogbugz.
The last one is Cerberus Help Desk which is what we picked in the end. It's not free but it is low cost. Basically it's designed for help desk work instead of the more generic request tracking.
What does that mean? Well you can:
*Say how long it took to handel an email
*Assign billable time
*Create Service level Agreements
*Look at about 15 different built in reports
*use the knowledge base build in.
*Teach it's fuzzy logic engine that looks up knowledge base articales based on the content of the email.
*Setup Mutliple groups which can't see each others tickets based.
*Add custom feilds
So far I've been very impressed with it.
I have experience with Exchange and Sendmail, and some familiarity with a number of other systems including postfix and PMDF.
I do not find any basis for your claim in my experience; AFAIK, for "giving access to mailboxes to those who need it" Exchange is pretty much equivalent to everything else out there.
Can you explain to me how you came to the conclusion that Exhange is "the best thing for this", as you put it?
If needed she forwards to Help Desk or Engineer or Production or Marketing. You cannot automate info questions but tracking them is a different story we have a custom web app she uses to assign info request to depts of course this requires constantly training her who does what but it sure beats all of us recieving the same mail and then checking to see whose working it. All requests must get resolved in some manner or you get the dreaded POST-IT note on the monitor, which is followed by the even more dreaded " Do you have a few minutes? ".
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Too many Posts today. Glad I'm not a script or I'd have to keep it up all day.
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