One of the cool things about our collaborative project management platform product - the Instant Business Network (IBN) - is that it has a built in help desk/issues management subsystem.

If you consider our company as a simple case study, we are working on products with multiple releases, performing customer/technical support, and managing customization projects with our major customers.  We're doing more, but you get the picture...

The IBN is great for segmenting our portfolio of internal and external projects.  This is the pro-active side of the IBN where you plan and coordinate your projects, but the other side is dealing with issues - the reactive side.

Most companies try to use e-mail beyond what it is really designed for and it actually can be bad for business in some cases.

Specifically when you are trying to track, measure, coodinate, and resolve issues. 

So for us, we need to deal with several issue types coming at us from multiple directions.

1) Feedback and wish lists from Customers

2) technical developer Support e-mails

3) Internal business and product issues (related to projects)

4) External Customer Issues Related to custom integration work we do

5) Various e-mails that come to us through our partners, distribution, and sales agent networks

But because the IBN has an Inbound e-Mail routing feature (essentially a pop mail subsystem) it actually allows all of those e-mails to come into the central IBN system for routing to the approrpiate project, product, and support teams where the work can be done.  This is how we manage everythign we do for our products, customers, partners, and employees.

Now if you know e-mail and you do, you realize that if you have 10 people all dealing with e-mail you have no possible chance of reporting on the status of what is happening with all of those e-mails.  In fact simple questions like:

How long they have been in the queue? Who has been working on the most issues? What projects have an abundance of high priority issues? How many new issues do we have today? How many have we closed? etc...

In the case of the IBN everything is in a common database complete with instant 1 click views and reports.

Best of all...  we do not have to train anyone outside of our company to use it - all they do is send e-mails to us and our system and process does the rest.

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