Does your office have Issues?

1. If your office responds to repeat customer requests that require various staff in your office to carry out a number of time consuming tasks sequentially,  you have issues.
2. If on the other hand your office generates and disseminates information to multiple contacts, you don't have issues.

Many offices have issues with their issues, primarily because they are a type 1 office trying to use type 2 office tools!  A type 1 office needs to have a central email repository within which to store their issues.  Instead, many type 1 offices use standard email clients which are designed for type 2 offices.

As an electrician my office is a type 1 office.  Retailers and marketers have type 2 offices.  For my centralised email repository, I use Roundup Issue Tracker.

In a corporate environment Roundup does three things particularly well:

1. Acts as a email repository that can be easily searched by all staff.  Issues don't get lost in Roundup, because they can never be deleted, just retired.
2. Makes an excellent workflow tool that tracks issues and amends their status as they move through their lifecycle in the organisation.
3. Ensures that customers can easily communicate with staff, but in such a way that inappropriate information never crosses the boundary between the small office and the outside world.

But, to do these things I had to make some changes to Roundup, because Roundup's original target audience is software developers not corporate office environments. To make Roundup a happy camper in your typical small office environment, my version of Roundup now looks like this:

• I distinguish between internal users and external users, since external users only interact with Roundup from their email client while internal users favour its Web interface.  For this distinction we have four types of user:

1. Anonymous - Roundup does not know their email address
2. User - External user
3. Staff - Internal user
4. Admin - Administrator

• The Staff role is a new role that I created.  It is appended to the other roles to obtain the required behaviour eg. (Admin, Staff) or (User, Staff)

• I send out HTML emails which include corporate signatures to external users.  Internal emails remain as plain text.

• By default Roundup only sends emails internally to Staff. To send an email to an external client, Staff have to set a flag on their message.

• If Roundup is to act as an effective repository, it's database must not be polluted with spam. To prevent spam I wrote the following business rules:
• If an email sender is Anonymous their email is bounced to an Administrator.
• If a User (not Staff) is known to Roundup, but they are attempting to create a new issue, their email is bounced to an Administrator.
• In both cases, if the Administrator determines that the email is not spam, they forward it back into Roundup, where it appears as a new issue.