A developer (of a line of Windows products) I know is abandoning his Yahoo-groups forums for good reasons, and moving to a web-based "Help Desk" package that sounds ghastly---can't post to it via email, for one thing. He thinks it'll make life better for him, by assigning tracking numbers and organizing the threads that his largely-clueless customers seem incapable of doing on their own. Some of the current beta testers are howling in protest, wanting to keep an email capability, and some are even advocating his moving to my provider's site that hosts secure SmartList lists economically. (A lot of the beta testers subscribe to a related list that I maintain.)
If I were in his position, I'd want to use SmartList in conjunction with whatever additiions made sense to impliment a system for providing help and tracking feedback from beta testers. So, my question to this esteemed group is, what do you know of that's off the shelf that I could suggest to this guy?
The basic requirements seem to be some means of assigning ticket numbers to bugs, or individual product support issues, and a searchable archive, in addition to the usual mailing-list features.
He's probably hopelessly wedded to his help-desk web thingie, but it seems worth at least pointing him to something more user friendly if I can.
TIA,
Jim