Wow... sounds too good to be true finally.

After searching for a good helpdesk/ticketing/project management solution for distributed project teams for over 1,5 years without really finding what I wanted today I came across TrackStudio and I think with

• Hierarchival Task Management and Work Breakdown Structure
• Field-Level Visibility per user role
• Inheritance of project structure setups (that means setting up

the three major features I was missing in so many "small scale" systems out there seem to be in place.

I haven't tested this solution yet, but with an enterprise license including source-code (java) for around $3k this is one piece of software that every bigger project should be able to afford even for it's own sake... not to mention a bigger project organization.

What impresses me further are a broad range of (soap-based) integration options

• into SCM systems CVS and SVN out-of-the-box
• into Outlook (out of the box?!)
• into the whole MS office app palette (I want to see THAT!)
• and so many more...

and finally a hefty user security thing, tons of e-mail subscription and e-mail submission features (even for time-tracking! hi trackertool - I spent 8 days today on task #424 LOL)

The workflow features deserve a separate mention - TrackStudio allows you to specify and enforce your tracking process through states and state transitions... that's per project ... and of course you might have different project types like marketing project, software project, evaluation project, procurement project, employee hiring project etcetc in your organization, don't you?

some goodies:

• Web-based workflow editor
• Complete workflow customization: states, transitions, etc
• Unlimited numbers of workflows, states and transitions
• Multiple workflows per project
• Multiple task categories per workflow
• Dependent task categories
• Workflow inheritance WOW.. that's what you want
• Per-project workflow customization,
• Per-workflow customizable fields /fancy!/
• Elapsed time history recorded in the database with comments
• Workflow and e-mail notification integration

I must admit after finding my major requirements fulfilled I must take a look at the requirements list I made over 2 years ago for the prospective tracking tool to see if there's anything missing... my gut feeling says that time-tracking, accounting and invoicing might play a minor role, so i'll check out features for that and integration into existing systems out soon.

They offer a hosted solution at $40 / month for the professional edition for 20 users AND there's a 30day trial available - so I have nothing to lose but signup and learn more... :-)

PS: these guys mentioned that if you find a tool that covers their functionality, they will link and advertise it own their own site... cool