New Project: Project Management/Time Keeping/Ticketing System in Drupal

This week I have started a new project -- building a Project Management, ticketing, and time tracking system for the company I work for.  We're an educational services company, and provide a very diverse set of services, and have always operated without this sort of direct tracking and data gathering for our work; as the company grows and evovles, we are finding that we need to operate more like a business and less like a school -- and more and more like a 21st century business. 

And, since I do everything with Drupal anymore, I'm going to work on building this PM system in Drupal.  I'm going to call this site Project Radio Collar, for the time being, but I reserve the right to come up with a much better name. 

I started out by checking out several of the existing modules that handle this sort of thing.  There are a handful of different ways to go, but none of them really fit my needs at this point.

Project: http://drupal.org/project/project

Project is the obvious place to start, but it's not a good fit -- for one thing, it's really targeted at software and software support, and that's not a terrific fit for our organizational needs.  We're looking for a system that will help us track tasks and work related to a wide variety of projects, only a fraction of which will be software-type projects.  There's a level of complexity we really don't need, so I started to look at other options.

Casetracker:  http://drupal.org/project/casetracker

Casetracker is a step in the right direction, but it's still a much narrower focus that what we need. 

Storm: http://drupal.org/project/storm

Storm looked like it has a lot of promise.  I installed it and played with it for most of a day, trying to configure it to handle our use cases.  What I ran in to was some usability problems and problem spots in the code.  For one thing, as of this writing, the Team Member functionality is not working, and that's one of the important things I need for this project to work for me. 

I think in 6 months Storm might be a great solution for a lot of users/developers.  But, at this point, the execution isn't robust enough for me.  Here are some of the key reasons I've eliminated it as an option.

• Like I said, the team functionality isn't working.
• At this point, there is no views integration.
• The fields don't play nice with CCK (I can't reorder or change the way the fields display in CCK).
• Date fields are handled as dropdowns for month, day, year. Since, in most cases there will be tow dates to enter (start and end), that's 6 dropdowns to operate  . . . .that's a usability black hole, when there are easy date picker tools available.

That's enough for me.  What I AM taking away from Storm is a blueprint for the sorts of content types that I'm going to need -- the developers have done a great job outlining what the module will do someday . . . I just don't have time to wait. I have just a few weeks to have something ready for beta testing, and this isn't a project I'm going to be able to spend a lot of dedicated time on, so I'm going to have build this myself with tools I trust . . . which sounds a whole lot like Views and CCK.