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I’ve been looking around these forums as my new web design/development start up is getting ready to build our site. Obviously, EE is a powerful CMS, so we’re building the site using it, and I’d love for the company’s backend to revolve around EE. Just wondering if anyone else has made this kind of thing happen yet. If not, how much of this is possible now? Is it even possible?

I’d like to try to have all this:
-a project management setup like the one stephenslater is working on right now (http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/55158/)
-an estimating/invoicing application like Mark Boulton developed a year and a half back (http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/sorting_my_workflow_out_part_two/)
-A customer support ticket application (which I suppose could be done like this: http://www.mackenty.org/index.php/site/comments/a_trouble_ticket_success_story_part_1/)
-Client Billing system running through CoolCommerce (http://coolclimate.ca/coolcommerce), and therefore, Foxycart.

Here’s the catch: it all needs to run off the same database of clients. I want it to all work together off the same client list, obviously. Is there anything I’m missing? Anything I haven’t forseen, but given your experience, you know I’ll need?

Also, I should throw in that I found this ticket module written by the ExpressionEngineer (http://www.expressionengineer.com/blog/ticket_module).

Possible license issues?
I know EE cannot be used for anything where the users “have their own sites”.

In terms of technical capability, my first guess is that rolling your own might be as easy as configuring EE. My brother worked at Lucent and did their trouble ticket stuff - he did it in .cfm, and he was not an experienced programmer. Doing custom db solutions in EE seems tough..at least the little I looked at it. There is no specific toolkit or docs showing how to do even the simplest thing…such as making another db table and having the login work for it.

No doubt just about anything can be done in php/mysql - but the questions is whether it should be done in EE. After all, if it is not saving you time and money, that does away with the entire premise.

Well, we wouldn’t be powering our clients’ sites through one installation. It would just be a client login to their account that would list estimates, payments, invoices, support requests, etc…

For now, at least, it looks like we’re going to use a combination of highrise/basecamp/freshbooks instead. We needed to get this new company off the ground and we don’t really have time to custom program a bunch of stuff and test it while we’re not yet making any money. We figured it was more important to have something that worked and go get ourselves some clients.

sounds interesting. Do you have a contact to discuss this further? PM me

Hmmm, I hope you two won’t keep this conversation entirely off line.  I am interested in building a similar infrastructure for myself for when I finally get to go free-lance.

Well, I haven’t yet had a chance to really delve any deeper than just an the idea. Here in the next couple of months, as we refine our client experience, we’ll try to bring this all together.

I don’t why you couldn’t build a package that utilized what EE has to offer to provide the capabilities you’re talking about.

You really linked some great resources hearsay. It’s a heck of a wishlist and might not be far from a reality. Some of those items would make great modules.
I just pitched going the basecamphq route for a project, that was just out of my league with EE, member features are at a premium. I saw tons of questions in the forums here on advanced user/member topics.
Basecamp beat the pricey solution a colleague came up with that was 60 to 90 bucks per user annually —wowie-ow.

$60-90 a user? That’s Primavera/Oracle/SAP territory, isn’t it?

hyper office, they never even got back to me. I hate places that really are vague on the pricing, but want you to sit through a demo, and then talk to sales. Kinda like a used car salesman.

I built an EE solution for this kind of thing for my own purposes.  It’s not as feature-rich as you describe in your first post but it gets the job done. It’s more of a client management system rather than a project management system.

Basically, it doesn’t server any internal development purposes.  But it does a fairly good job is keeping the client informed and giving them some tools to make payments / support requests.

I have the following sections:

Payments:  using Simple Commerce.  I post payments to each client’s account as I need to.  The payments only show for 1 purchase, so it tracks what is paid and what isn’t.  Pretty crude system, but again, serves my purposes for the time being.

Schedule:  1 entry per planned “milestone”.

Design Review:  1 entry per new “demo” that I make available to the client.  The publish form for a new entry in the “review” weblog has 4 custom fields for possible questions I want to ask to solicit specific feedback on any particular aspect of the design.  It also has 4 custom fields for possible answers.  I, of course, don’t enter the answers.  Then on the page, (using Solspace’s Form Helper plugin), I let the client edit/add answers into the answer fields (and only the answer fields).

Documentation:  Instructions for client’s site.  Usually one entry per topic.  Some are generic that are shown to all clients, some are client-specific.

Support System:  A system inspired by the EE one.  Each “ticket” is an entry made by the client via SAEF.  I have it set to email me once a support ticket is added.  I then log in, open up that entry to edit it and I can add a comment (possible solution, explantion, time frame to fix etc…), who the problem is assigned to if it needs to be fixed, etc…  Further communication on the issue is made through the comments to that entry. 

The key of course is to control who sees what—or rather, that a client only can access his/her information.  The way I choose to tackle this is to have all clients part of the same member group.  Members in that member group are then added to the author drop-down on the Publish page.  I then choose whichever client that particular entry should be restricted to as the author.  In my template, I restrict weblog:entries to posts where the logged in user is the author.

One limitation is that each client can only have one member account.  For clients that have multiple contact people, that have to use one account.  This has worked alright for me but I can imagine instances where it won’t.

With all that said, I still find the system to be a bit crude.  There are probably more intuitive ways of doing things.  I only started using EE a few weeks ago.  Haven’t quite wrapped my head around relationships.  That might be a better option that some of what we use.

I’d also like to make the payments section more feature rich with increased PayPal features and centrally located client communication (currently all done externally).

My solution?  I’ve started a custom CI-based solution.  The goal is to first, and most importantly, get well versed on CI for the EE 2.0 release so that I have a running start on finally implementing some of our oft-requested features with the CI framework and end up with a useful PROJECT management system.

VB - Thanks for your insight into how you accomplish this.  I think I will be setting something similar up in the future…

Hehe. I’m kinda of rolling my own EE module to get some of this done. Progressing slowly of course.

This is both the beauty and curse of EE.  There are so many ways to do the same thing!  I love seeing how others accomplish tasks.  It certainly helps in my EE dev.