Need a software recommandation

[Saphira1977]

Hello,

Me and some friends decided to build a datebase of issues we have with various authorities in our work (we're architects) as a community resource and how we solved them. We tried to do it in google docs but it's a bit cumbersome and it doesn't quite work the way we want. What we want is:

1. Anybody with the link should be able to introduce an entry with an issue and several other notes about it - like where, year, what kind of project etc. Ideally each person should be able to modify their own entries, in case updates happened or they forgot to add something. Other people (except admins) should not be able to edit other people's entries. The link will be shared in our FB community page, which has over 3k members, so it's easy to stumble over a troll.
2. Anybody with the link should be able to submit a solution to that entry.
3. Anybody with the link should be able to view both the entries and the solutions.
4. A search engine with key words would be amazing.

We can't get google docs to make different kinds of permissions, and we're wondering if there's any software out there that would work better tha google docs. We're not IT savvy so it should be fairly easy to edit, not needing code knowledge.

Thank you very much for any input!

 

[Solandri]

Sounds like you want bug tracking software. You may need to hire someone IT-saavy to set it up (and set up automatic backups). But afterwards it should be pretty much self-running. Maybe call the IT guy back once a month to make sure the database is healthy.

https/blog.capterra.com/top-free-bug-tracking-software/
https/www.softwareadvice.com/resources/free-bug-tracking-software/

If you're doing this on a customer-by-customer basis, you may want to look into CRM software (customer resource management). That will allow you to track all sorts of other things for each customer like billing, projects, deadlines, etc, not just problems and fixes. Be prepared to pay for it though, since it's primarily a business tool.

 

[das_stig]

Don't forget data protection laws that you may need to follow !

 

[Saphira1977]

Thank you for the replies, and I'll look into the links. Hiring an IT savvy person to set it up wouldn't be a problem, if we can monitor it afterwards.

We won't need it for any customer kind of thing, it's simply a database of problems we encountered or good practices that would be nice to be applied in other places too for ourselves. It's not dedicated for one company, but for the architects community to get advise and ideas from others that stumbled over the issue before. It might sound weird that such a thing would be needed, but laws here are so badly made, there's a lot of interpretation going on. Sometimes, for ex., I submitted a request for a legal interpretation of some article or another, and I would like to put that advise into a database for any of my colleagues that stumbles over the same issue. We've already used facebook for discussions on various topics, but FB is a bad medium to keep things organized, so they eventually just slide off. A forum might be a longer term solution in the end, but a nice organized tool would still work better.

 

[Alabalcho]

You should also look at project-management online services like Asana, Jira, etc These will let you create projects, tasks, assign them, track them. Most of them allow for third-party collaboration without giving access to other projects.

A downside of this is that such services are usually priced on per-user basis.