[Hidden-tech] Email to task list / ticket system.

[Town Websites]

Thanks for the reply, David (and others).  Do you know if Roundup Tracker
has good NGINX integration?  The servers I admin run NGinx because I can run
multiple SSL sites with a single IP.

Also, do you know of any demo builds that show Roundup in action?  It looks
like there is good documentation but little in the way of screenshots or
demos.

I dug in a bit more with Outlook tasks as a stopgap...

Charlie Heath
Town Websites


-----Original Message-----
From: R. David Murray [mailto:rdmurray at bitdance.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 3:25 PM
To: Town Websites
Cc: 'Hidden-tech'
Subject: Re: [Hidden-tech] Email to task list / ticket system.

On Thu, 01 May 2014 11:50:17 -0400, "Town Websites" <townwebsites at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I need a better way to organize small tasks from email.  I'd like to 
> be able to tag emails directly to a task list and then manage the task 
> list like a ticket based support system, perhaps integrated with a 
> project management system.  I currently use Outlook 2007 for email 
> (old habits).  I host and do php & Joomla; if I host a system like 
> security will be a high priority, I don't want a back door to my 
> client's server because of a ticket system that wasn't designed with 
> security as its first imperative, not to mention that

I doubt you will find any ticket system that was designed with security as
its *first* imperative, since the first imperative for a good ticket system
should be to be a good ticket system :).  But I take your point.

> I'd like the tickets and tasks to be secure as well.  Adding 
> categorized notes is a bonus which can be tagged to tasks or projects 
> is a bonus.  Basic objective is to reduce my time managing many small 
> tasks and avoid having some small tasks get lost in the noise.
> 
> Thoughts about options?  Thanks.

It's not php/joomla, but...

I use roundup (http://roundup-tracker.org) for my own business and for some
of my customers (as well as helping maintain the bugs.python.org tracker).
It's Python instead of php, and designed to run behind Apache as the front
end.  Roundup is very flexible in terms of what you can do with ticket
properties and sub-objects, but of course that does mean you would *want* to
do that kind of tailoring, which takes some time and at least a little bit
of Python knowledge.  I can visualize how to implement what you are wanting
in Roundup.  The categorized notes would be the most complicated (new object
class), but not hard at all for someone who knows Roundup.

Like most ticket systems, you can set it up to create a ticket via email,
and thereafter any email tagged with the relevant issue number becomes part
of that ticket.  It also has a facility (that can be turned off) to allow
you to update issue properties by tagging the email's subject line
appropriately.

The security model is also flexible, providing automatically-enforced role
based access restrictions on both an object and an object-property basis,
with even finer grained control possible by writing short python snippets to
implement more sophisticated access tests.

Python and Roundup have had their share of security issues, but not nearly
as many as php, as far as I can tell.  The Roundup devs take security
seriously, as do the Python devs (of which I am one :).

--David

http://www.murrayandwalker.com              http://www.bitdance.com