Thread

We actually already have expression engine; can’t say that we’ve done much with it as I currently have one developer and he is busy doing client sites and has not had time to work on ours.

I want to build a customer support site with help desk and time tracking.  Time reported would be exported to Excel for invoice & payroll.

Both employees & customers need to to have secured access to the site seeing only those projects ‘belonging’ to them.

Employees also need to be able to view tasks assigned to other employees or tasks that have not yet been assigned.

The customer page would have a calendar, forum, request for service, etc.

Can I do the data dump?  Can I relate time entries to the original post from the customer?  Do I need multiple sites to secure customer data from other customers (so they only see their own)?

Thanks,
Betty

Hi Betty,

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here. Are you looking for Help Desk system to manage customer requests, track response times, auto-generate tickets, etc? Or are you looking for a project management system? Or a tool that does both?

EE is not made to be either one of those though you could certainly configure it to work along those lines but it would require customization. For example, there is no out-of-the-box feature for generating tasks lists, associating those tasks with an employee or a project, time tracking, or auto-creation of private “project sites”. That is all very possible with careful planning and customization but unless you have a specific reason to use EE as a help desk and/or project management tool, I’d recommend using tools made specifically for those tasks. 

For example, though we could bend EE into a help desk system we decided to implement Userscape’s HelpSpot instead. We just didn’t see a need to repurpose EE from a publishing tool into a help desk, especially when HelpSpot fit our needs so perfectly. There are a wide range of project management tools available as well from the popular Basecamp to the self-hosted ActiveCollab.

If you shed some light on why you want to use EE for this we can give you a better answer as to whether its worth customizing EE or going with a dedicated solution.

Yes; I am looking for both a help desk and project management system.  We currently use basecamp.  We’ve looked at both helpspot and active collab.  We thought that active collab would be a suitable replacement but have decided against it. 

I see that helpspot has released v2 since we last looked at it; I’ll look again.  Thank you.