Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
From: Scott Silva Sent: March 28, 2007 15:07
If you have an in-house developed system, then your programmers should be the ones to add the proper features. E-mails sent to "support" should be picked up and managed by the system.
I will get myself on that right away. Who needs sleep anyway (I hear it is highly overrated). But seriously...
While what your suggesting is certainly valid, I am always hesitant to program functionality that is already available in an off-the-shelf package. In other words I would rather not re-invent the wheel as the saying sometimes goes. That and I am quite sure that I would not be able come up with something that even remotely approaches the functionality and stability that would be available in a reasonably mature open source or proprietary package. Also, as I alluded to above, I just do not have the time to devote to this.
I've used mailman lists as a really quick fix for this sort of thing to just give a place where you can control redistribution and keep an archive. And you can tell from a glance at the archive list if any of the inbound messages did not have at least one response. RT can be used this way too and is nicer because you can have additional queues and if the first person to respond can't complete whatever needs to be done, the ticket can be moved to a queue that will give it to someone that can. Either of these can be configured as the target of an email address and take effect more or less transparently, although in RT's case you probably need to periodically go though and close the tickets that have been completed by the email response. I still have a couple of these set up for general notification and problem messages. Everyone just interacts by email but the system collates the responses together so you can review later.