So I preface this with saying this may belong in IT Security, not too sure feel free to move.
Currently we have an email account [email protected] - hosted via google apps (as is all our email).
We had an incident where we had to terminate an employee. This employee however had the password for this account as we have 20-30 people utilizing it at any given point to manage customer emails etc.
Thinking on this I feel there must be a better way to manage access. With Google you can associate upto 10 email accounts to another the problem is we have more like 20-30 people going.
We were evaluating tools such as SalesForce and Assistly where people have their own login credentials and then the system contains the appropriate smtp information for the [email protected] email address to send emails from it rather than a users personal account.
Aside from those options does anyone have any other thoughts? One suggestion floated was moving everyone to desktop clients and saving the PW info there so they could only login from their physical workstation but we may have situations where we'd like employees to work remotely.
Does anyone have experience with this sort of system where ~20-30 people are responding from one email box and how to manage security and access?
If you need a system to allow teams of people to share "tickets" or "tasks" that are all emailed to one address (e.g. [email protected]), there are numerous open-source solutions to handle this (e.g. have a look at OTRS otrs.org).
If you can run your own email server, Cyrus IMAPD support shared imap folders. This would allow you to have different accounts access shared mail space. You should not continue to share a single account/password with multiple people.
The simple answer is to turn the mailbox account into a email group with all your emails added to it. The first person to respond to the "request" uses the group account in the reply so everyone knows that you've "got the call". I do this for a small firm with 3 support techs but I'm not sure if it would scale to 20-30 people.
At that point it's more important to talk about how many calls a day, your average resolution time, and other requirements, but you may not have the budget or time for a medium sized support product.
I haven't used it, but if you get a website from bluehost.com you can use http://osticket.com/ through their automated install system (cpanel).