What do you use as a system to manage your clients/support/development?

Question

i am normally developing either alone or with 2-3 other people. i handle almost all aspects of the business and development but as of current i am becoming overwhelmed with my client base. I need some system to help me out

What i am looking for is something that i can:

• Use to manage my client contacts
• Per client, manage the goals of the project im working/building on
• Per client, per project, manage the bugs
• Per client, per project manage support/helpdesk stuff... and then turn those into bugs
• Automate the communication of tickets and monitor email for support stuff.

I am down to hear ANY ideas/options you have no matter how radical. :)

thank you!

Answer 1

I've been using Assembla -- No complaints, and it covers just about everything -- and it's free to try.

Answer 2

We use HEAT from FrontRange solutions for most of the things you've mentioned. They also offer other solutions, such as CRM, etc. Nicely customizable, easy to interface to, nice self-service modules, excellent monitoring tools and auto-escalations... (and no I don't work for them. I've just been very happy with them over the last 10 years.)

Answer 3

We have bought the Source Code licence to JitBit Helpdesk, my colleague is in the process of adding some extra fields to support our work-flow, I have been working Visual Studio and AnkhSVN integration so that we can see bugs from VS2008/VS2010.

The user interface is functional, it can be styled to our likings, the code is a bit haphazard but the database is simple enough.