Personal Ticket Tracking System for Admins?

sirfunk asks: "I am a student and part-time system admin for a few local businesses. Most of the businesses I work for do not have me come in regularly, I'm sort of on a on-call, fix-it-when-it-breaks schedule. I'm wondering if anyone out there has come across a personal ticket-tracking system, that would allow my businesses to submit tickets with their problems and priority. The primary requirement would be that the user interface (for my businesses) would be very simple. I've checked out Bugzilla and Trac both of them look way overcomplicated for my needs. Any ideas?"

One or Zero

[joe90]

One or Zero works for me - http://www.oneorzero.com/ [oneorzero.com]

OSS Choices

[futuresheep]

There's a few packages out there that you can run on a LAMP server, including the following:

PHP Helpdesk [sourceforge.net]
PHP Support Tickets [phpsupporttickets.com]
Trouble Ticket Express [troubleticketexpress.com]

Re:Dedicated Email Address

[tsstahl]

I'll second this second.

I'll even give you a gmail invite if you need one.

Just tell your folks to send you a news story email: how, what, where, when, why.

Every one of your clients has email in some form. If they don't have an email address, call Wharton for a case study specimen.

The best advice I can give you is as a one man operation, DO NOT get hung up on your own infrastructure. Every minute spent on your office is one less billable, or fullfillable moment of your life.

Time happens, and you won't believe how long these clients will be a part of your life. Hopefully your keyboard will eventually give way to something warm and cuddly (preferably of the same species) and you'll appreciate your sparse, ugly, but workable processes and procedures. :)

Oh yea, since this is slashdot, there is a really useful website at www.google.com. You type a question into the magic rectangle, and a bunch of possible answers appear. Google is kind of like a magic 8 ball on meth. Hopefully this admonishment is snide enough to win mod points. :)^2

Re:Dedicated Email Address

[Vellmont]

I'd have to disagree here. The point of a form to fill out is to elicit more detailed responses from the ticket submitters. All too often if you only have the free-form of an email people won't give enough details of the problem to be able to start finding a solution. If you have fields like "what do you expect to happen", "what error messages, if any do you get?", "what do you do to replicate the problem?", "how urgent is a solution needed?", etc asks people many of the questions you're ultimately going to need the answer to solve the problem.

Remember, the people who are submitting job tickets aren't necessarily problem solvers, so they don't know what kind of information you're going to need to fix a problem. A little guidance of a form can go a long way to make the system more useable for everyone.