Hello all, I would like your opinion on what type of software that I need. My situation is this; I work for an electronic fabrication company that makes circuit boards. Right now we track each board by a yellow paper card (yellow card) that we will put what we did and how long it took. My Boss would like me to come up with a system that is online and connected to a database. He wants is where:
1. the testing department can go online to find out the status of the board (instead of hounding him)
2. he can query to see how long each board took to complete (and to break the hours down to see where we can make improvements and to get a better quote for the next customer)
3. get rid of all of the paper work.


I am new to doing what he wants done so I am looking for an open source solution (also like everything else there is no “budget” for it) and have been looking at CMSs, specifically Plone (plone.org) but I think that this may be over kill. Am I over thinking what I need to do? What I think I need is a web page and database that does not require to much technical knowledge to use. Any advice or suggestions are needed. Thank you in advance.

To bw honest, a CMS sounds like overkill for a relatively small proj like that.
You could code it using LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP,Python,Perl) if you have or are prepared to learn the skills.
It's all free.
OTOH, others may know of a simple free CMS you can get. You'll likely need the same tools to underly it though.

There are a lot of issue/ticket tracking systems out there, more or less suitable for your purposes. I don't see the point in writing one from scratch since reinventing the wheel never made anyone happy. freshmeat.net should list quite a few - the first I found was IRM.

Håkan