helpdesk support ticket list. Users can only see their own, yet get emailed when they are updated by helpdesk staff

Question

I'm trying to setup a list in sharepoint 2010 that end users can submit and view support tickets on. The user should be able to only see their own tickets, not ones other users have submitted. IT staff should be able to see and edit all tickets.

Ideally end users should be able to add to a multi-line text field that has "Append Changes to Existing Text" turned on, but not edit any other fields in the ticket. I've given up on getting that to work.

My current problem rests in alerts. If I turn on the setting under "list settings" > "advanced list settings" > "Read access" > "Read items that were created by the user" then give the helpdesk staff "design" access to the list they can properly see and edit all items.

Unfortunately this setting deleted all alerts on this list and any new alerts get the error message "You cannot create alerts for lists for which users can only read their own items."

I saw on another site that "this is by design" as why would you want to get an alert for content only you could have posted. I'm wondering how to undo this short-sighted design choice as in my case there will be content that other people post that you can see. Ideally this is a setting somewhere I can turn off but I'm expecting to have to install a wsp file to modify sharepoint to fix it, (preferably JUST undo this restriction and not have to setup anything else.)

I've heard suggestions to use workflows to accomplish this but we want end users to choose when they get alerted, not just spam everyone. (also I've got similar lists for quite a few departments, not just helpdesk so I'd like to avoid having to write a workflow for each list to duplicate something that works out of the box on lists 99% of the time.)

Answer 1

My solution is dependent on Workflow.

Here is solution:

1. Create a Content Type for the Helpdesk
2. Create a Reusable Workflow for the Content Type
3. Add Content Type to lists you wish and make it default

Since you are using Content Type so you just need to attach it to the every list you want to behave in similar way.

Answer 2

I think the best course of action here would be to continue to use the item level permissions so that users can see only their submitted items. Give the help desk staff users Manage Lists access for this list so they can see everything and use an on creation and on change workflow to send emails to the proper recipients.