FogBugz as a Help Desk application

I've mentioned recently that I'm a fan of the work of Joel Spolsky.

At my last place of employment I implemented Fogbugz to replace the defect tracking and enhancement management tool we were using at the time and I found that it made light work of that task with the added bonus of an impressive reduction in costs. I was particularly impressed by how uncomplicated it made everything compared with what Joel would consider "high ceremony" equivalent bug tracking tools. I found it to be software that epitomised the whole "less is sometimes more" ethos.

Reading Joel's blog this morning I picked up today on a great article by Kiere on using Fogbugz as a Help Desk application. The back story is that Kiere was looking for a Help Desk system but due to budget constraints (we all know about those, right!) decided to take a look at how he was using Fogbugz and for the investment of a bit of thought and with a few tweaks here and there he's got a functional help desk ticket system together with a knowledge base. Very cool stuff.

It makes you wonder how often software purchasing decisons are made on the strength of "I need one of those" rather than thinking about leveraging exisiting tools first, which is an obvious question to which part of the answer is that you need smart people who can make the intellectual leap which identifies the possibilty in the first place.

Knowing that Joel has read Kiere's article I also wonder if he's planning on a few changes in the next version of FogBugz to make operating the software as a Help Desk tool a more obvious component of the marketed functionality.

Tags: Joel Spolsky, FogBugz