We want to use a ticketing system. The goals are :
- Store some emails easily - Connect with Outlook - Having a ticket history (view of all the mails, who has replied, …) - Having a global view of the tickets - Adding some reminders - …
We don't know if Alfresco is the best to do this. We can connect Outlook to Alfresco (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/IMAP) but the ticketing management should generates a lot of custom development. We are also looking on : http://www.otrs.com/en/
We have customers who use Alfresco to manage support ticketing, and partners with experience building these types of solutions. I believe we have a few partners who offer packaged solutions for issue management, but I can't find any advertised at the moment. It will take some work or the expertise of a consultant to get Alfresco to do issue management, so here are some things to consider as you evaluate your options:
* If you only need ticket management, then there are many open source solutions that can do a great job depending on your specific needs. If you aren't going to take advantage of the additional capabilities of Alfresco, then it probably isn't worth the complexity.
* If you are already using Alfresco, or want additional Alfresco capabilities, then building ticket management capabilities into Alfresco can provide significant benefits, including: ** Only needing to learn and maintain one technology platform, ** Users being able to do everything in a single system, ** Easy integration between a ticket and associated artifacts such as documentation, ** Integration with records management, ** Future customisability, ** It sounds like the IMAP interface and easy rules execution on SMTP ingestion would be perfect for your needs.
* I think it would be straightforward to integrate Alfresco with an issue tracking solution. I have seen two different integrations with JIRA that allows attaching issues to documents and vice-versa. Google suggests that people have tried Bugzilla, Trac, and OpenBravo integrations, but I don't see the results of that work available anywhere.
If you end up deploying on Alfresco or integrating with Alfresco, I hope you consider sharing your solution on http://addons.alfresco.com so that others can benefit.
We are actually doing a project using http://www.otrs.com/en/ to manage tickets. Like you said, there are a lot of benefits to use Alfresco but we think we need too much time (several weeks) to create a ticketing inside Alfresco.
