Posted on October 24, 2009 - by J Lane

HelpMeApp

Keeping with the tradition of writing about my ideas well in advance of them being ready for primetime, my next side project is going to be HelpMeApp.

One of the biggest problems I’ve run into with managing Mailmangr support is keeping a handle on the bug reports, feature requests and inquiries that come in.  I’ve got them scattered between a todo list in Basecamp, my inbox, and an online ticketing system.  I know that there are a million help desk/bug tracker apps out there, but I have yet to find one that’s really easy and great to use from both sides.  I’m currently using Zendesk, but I’m really not nuts about it (it’s just the best I’ve found so far).  I’m going to build HelpMeApp to be exactly what I want it to be, and then if other people are interested in using it, cool.  If not, at least I’ll stop dropping the ball on Mailmanagr requests!

I want something that’s equally easy for people to submit requests to, as for employees that have to respond to and manage those requests.  I had considered building HelpMeApp as another Basecamp/Highrise API project, on the back-end to manage all of the data; but I think there might be too many constraints with that idea.  You need to be able to merge requests, for example, and there’s no easy way to merge messages in Basecamp — so I don’t think the model will work.  There will likely be pretty deep integration though, just because that’s the way I roll (being able to add requesters to Highrise, and keep a history of their requests for example).

I’ve got a couple of other ideas to kick things up a notch or two.  I’ve actually managed to roll a couple of ideas that I’ve had in the past into HelpMeApp, and I think they’re pretty complimentary.  I’m pretty excited about where it’s going.

The bug/feature request list on Mailmanagr is starting to decrease in length now, so I think the time is right.  Any thoughts out there, or “must have” features?  I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’d like it to look like, but if you’ve got a “it would be really neat if”, I’m all ears.

I’m probably going to do a big of a “live blogging” of the progress, although it could be slow at times.  There’ll at least be the occasional update over at Industry Interactive about how things are going.