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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 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.
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
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