Okay, I'll be honest: the real reason I've set up this Intranet CMS for a client last week was to give his users a more formal (and less invasive) way of letting me know about their IT woes than ringing my mobile all the time - talk about laziness being the mother of all invention ;-)

Having established that I'm lazy we can safely assume that I wanted a really simple solution i.e. a full blown issue tracking system such as PloneCollectorNG was out of the question.

Seriously, the main reason for not using that is that such systems raise the entry bar too high for the users. If a tool is too complex, nobody will use it, trust me.

So, I've simply installed a blog (SimpleBlog 1.2.1, that is, befittingly) and added categories such as Mac, Windows, Email, Urgent, Printing etc. That's it. Nothing else. Fini.

This keeps it fairly simple for the users, too, though. Since I've linked the Plone site via LDAP to our OSX Server, all they need to do is log in with their usual credentials and fill out a little form - voila!

I, in turn, have subscribed to the RSS feed of this blog and know, whenever something is up. And on my weekly routine visit on-site I know exactly what's waiting for me. Also, for example, one click on the 'Windows' category tells my Windows admin at one glance what he's in for, as well.

It may not sound like much, but to have a central, authoritative, chronological list of who had which issue broken down into categories is a real boon for my work.

And as a nerd I've got this warm fuzzy feeling of having accomplished 90% results with 10% effort - and it involves a blog! Can't beat that ;-)