Having worked in many help desks over the years, I have gotten accustomed to using ticket tracking systems such as Tivoli, Vantive, Onyx and ServiceCenter.
I would like to be able to use a software product such as this in my home, to monitor my task items, big and small, for around the house. I would like to be able to assign priorities, create new line items with timestamps, so I can add individual notes to each ticket (such as when I make a related phone call), and have statuses such as “Open”, “Closed”, “Waiting on…” and so forth. I would also like to be able to view and sort all of my open items in a queue.
I am not really concerned to much with setting alarms and reminders, I want to be able to access everything from my queue.
What sorts of free software exists like this on Windows?
I think I’d prefer a standalone application, not something that runs thru a browser. I have no problem running a local database, like MySQL, but would prefer an actual piece of software.
Something like Task Coach, maybe? Open source, runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux + other Unixy systems, and iOS. Sadly no Android version at the moment. Looks to have a pretty good feature set, and you can run a Funambol server if you want to synchronize tasks across devices.
If you have an old machine kicking around, check out some of the standalone Linux “appliance” builds the Turnkey Linux folks have.
In ten minutes your old machine would have everything it needs to be serving up all kinds of cool stuff, all in a tidy preconfigured Ubuntu server installation.
They have a Mediawiki appliance (Wikipedia for your home!). They also have a few ticket tracking packages like you mention. Bugzilla is in there, as well as some stuff that is more help-desk oriented such as OTRS (Bugzilla is more developer-oriented).
Perhaps you might like the Tracks appliance, for Getting Things Done?
I see you said no browser, but those appliances are so cool they deserve at least a quick peek.
The Tasks feature in Outlook does pretty much everything you’ve mentioned.
No it isn’t a full-featured bug tracker. But for your purposes it probably has everything you need. There’s also the journalling feature which almost nobody uses. It’s pretty OK if you have some need to document the timeline of what happened when beyond just due dates & when-completed.
It’s easy to pooh-pooh it, but take a close look before you dismiss it.
This is an excellent suggestion and works pretty much how I wanted it to. I haven’t gotten to play around with it extensively, but I can tell it will work for my needs… as soon as I get around to actually populating it with all of my tasks. Thanks!
Remedy.
Simple ODBC back end and configurable Windows front end.
Reporting is lame but you can tweak that with and ODBC connection to a decent databse solution.