Local Government Web Network

Can’t keep track of your work? It’s time to Unfuddle!

By Diana Mounter : May 31, 2008 | In Tools & applications |

I am part of a 2 person web team at the LGSA, and have the responsibility of supporting about 15 websites, requiring the use of numerous modules, custom features, databases, xml feeds, and other exciting things. This is nothing exceptional in the world of web support but as many of you will understand it means you get a fair share of jobs to attend to.

My day of reckoning…

Recently some of our websites were hit with an SQL injection attack which put some malicious code in parts of our site and caused Internet Explorer to crash for some people viewing those pages. We had to take down all or parts of sites and revert to the last clean backup of the sites affected.

The impact of the malicious attack had a huge impact on our workload. Up until then we had been using a very old basic system to track jobs that was originally used by our IT support. It wasn’t something I or the staff enjoyed using and it wasn’t particularly helpful. I realised I needed some much more effective job tracking software, and I needed quick.

Evaluating a new system

I was given different recommendations by several IT guys and web nerds, after changing my opinion several times I decided to spend a day downloading trial versions, watching demos, and reading through the specs of several different job tracking systems. I developed a quick checklist of features and rated them with 1 to 5 stars so that I could easily evaluate which system met my requirements best.

Unfuddle came out on top. The most important features to me were:

• Easy to use for staff to log jobs and keep updated with progress
• Very quick and simple to install and setup hosting (at a low cost)
• Allow me to easily see all jobs in the system with due dates and priorities

How it unfuddle’s your life work

Unfuddle is orientated towards use by web teams, it allows you to create projects, add milestones to a project, and then add tasks (or tickets) to each milestone or project. Although it’s an effective project management tool it works well for job tracking everyday helpdesk issues. You can customise the permissions for individual users, so that means you can keep it simple for staff to log a job so they don’t get confused by all the other functions.

You can choose to let staff see all the other jobs in the system, or not as you wish. I felt it was important to allow staff to see all the jobs that we were dealing with so that it would help them evaluate the priority of their job amongst others, and have more of an understanding of the size of our workload.

The system allows you to add comments, track your time spent on a job, and link it to other tickets if there are related issues. The person reporting the job gets updated via email of the progress of the job. You can also choose who you assign work to if you have more than one person in your team. And you can easily export all jobs to a csv file or print out the entire list of jobs in the system so your Director can see how busy you are!

What? Even more features???

Unfuddle also has a built in message board which you can allow all or some of your staff to post messages and respond to. It has a wiki which I’m thinking of using to store documentation for our CMS. And for the uber techi people out there it even has GIT repositories for source control.

See for yourself

I could go on about more features, and I know my needs might be different from other people, but if you are looking for an easy to use, inexpensive, job tracking tool that you can setup very quickly and don’t need to worry about hosting, Unfuddle is well worth considering.

Check it out: http://unfuddle.com