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Issue Tracking Ticketing Systems?
An anonymous reader asks: "Our company has expanded to 5 employees, and we are looking at setting up and installing an Issue Tracking System for all employees to use throughout the company. It turns out there are many ticketing systems available in both commercial and open source solutions. We originally planned on using Request Tracker but we were unable to implement it due to the complexities of the system. For our company, we are looking for a simple to install Issue Ticketing system (preferably PHP and MySQL based to be hosted on our basic web hosting) to improve both the efficiency of our company, and improve our record keeping of all of our issues. How do you manage all of your tasks, and what software do you use, if any, to achieve this?"
We had a problem with people harassing the sysadmin (me) to do stuff and I was having trouble with time management and documenting my workload. We already had a trac system (http://trac.edgewall.org/) in place for other reasons and we used this to implement a sysadmin request system where people could enter their problem in trac and their request would be sent to the sysadmin (or a list of people in our case) who would then resolve the issue and report it as such. This produced a nice audit trail showing requests and their resolutions as well as any outstanding issues. Of course, it is all open source and free which is also nice.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Depending on what you want, I'd suggest either Trac ( http://trac.edgewall.org/ ), or OTRS ( http://www.otrs.org/ ). Trac has a pretty basic ticket system, but that's combined with a Wiki and Subversion (don't know if you do coding), while OTRS is a quite powerful ticket system (admittedly, it looks like crap, but it does get the job done) with email piping and all the other things you would expect.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ticket- tracking_systems
Hint : Mantis (GPL) and Cerberus Helpdesk (proprietary) are both php/Mysql based.
I don't mean to sound negative, but at 5 employees there couldn't be too many issues to track, really?
Perhaps just implement a policy that says all requests for change/work/whatever must be formally made by email. Prefix it with [TASK] or something equally dumb and you have a nice way of filtering it into a folder.
It's nice to want to spend the time and implement a flexible, sizeable solution but think of the time to maintain it down the track. For 5 employees is it really worth it? We have about 20 people doing coding/testing (and a handful of other managerial types) on site and we have 1 full time person to manage the issue tracker and source control. That's pretty much all he does (and the occasional IT fill-in when the IT guys take leave).
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But what about SharePoint (it's free on any Windows box) with the Help Desk template.
It's easy to install and is extendable.
No, it's not open source. But it's free as in it don't cost nothing (beyond the server license, that is.)
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My team just finished evaluating issue trackers, and the final three that we came up with were Bugzilla, Trac and Mantis for both technical and political reasons (Mantis is used elsewhere in the company but that's not saying much since we're so big).
We ended up deciding on Trac because of its wonderful integration with SVN, we are using a lot of python in other areas of our team and it is pretty well documented, there is a great wealth of easy to install (but not always well written) plugins and other than some quirks with the ClearSiler package it is no harder to install than any of the other packages we evaluated. If you use the subversion repository (which can be used for more than code), it is really easy to make links to other tickets, specific documents inside the repository and specific revisions.
However, Trac requires Python (you'll probably want 2.5 as the next release will require it) and either mod_python or fastCGI with a compatible webserver in addition to a subversion repository. Depending on what database you choose (SQLite3 is the default but you can also use Postgre and MySQL but the MySQL support isn't perfect yet) you will have to install the appropriate Python bindings for it and if you install the current stable release you will also need ClearSilver (but make sure you check the Trac Wiki before you install as people seem to have trouble unless they use specific versions of ClearSilver).
If you are serious about using only MySQL and PHP, I would suggest Mantis. It certainly isn't the prettiest thing out there but it does work and does meet your required dependancies. However, if you can swing the extra dependancies I would suggest Trac. Good luck!