A simple ticket system, for free.

Here is a solution for a simple ticket system. Sometimes the customers don’t have any ticket system available for the current project. To pass around mail with status of each task is cumbersome and hard to track and will eventually end up with undone tasks. The alternative to use an online system that cost money can sometimes be a political issue and it has to be approved by the project. And to make things harder, the nature of a ticket system, is that it is shared by many peoples and many peoples means many opinions.

This is a pragmatic approach, DropBox! Use it and share it in the project, eventually it will be adopted.

• I have downloaded and modified a spreadsheet from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/
• You can download it here http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18883163/%C3%84renden.xlsx
• Created a DropBox account.(It's free upp to 2gb)
• Created a folder and shared the folder to all members of the project.
• Copy the spreadsheet to shared folder; it will automatically be synchronized to all members of the shared folder when the file is saved.

• Here is one of the most important steps. For each project there is a RSS stream that you can subscribe to; add the RSS feed to Outlook (or your preferred RSS reader that you use). If you don't have events shown in a way that you are used to, you will forget to check if the document has been updated.
• When somebody updates the excel spreadsheet you will get a notification in the Outlook client, and you can instantly see the changes in your synchronized DropBox folder.

The down side is that DropBox is considered as "unsafe" but I can assure you it is not more unsafe than passing the excel file through mail on the Internet. Another downside is that if you have a synchronization conflict, you probably have type in your changes again.