Story

These days, there's been a ton of innovation in these areas, and there's consensus that collaboration-by-email is not fun. And there are lots of new approaches to these age-old problems.

So, how would you do it?

I'd hire a consultant.

OK, seriously, what you are describing is nowadays referred to as a CMS - which can variously refer to call, contact, customer, configuration or content management system.

Some of the Wikipedia articles I'm about to cite identify some of the attributes that people care about, such as the ability to interact with the system via an electronic mail interface, or a web interface, or support for a specific operating system, or adherence to a specific license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRM_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Each of those attributes translates into a choice of different software packages, which it is worth your while to negotiate if only to keep the results manageable, so that, after the dust settles down, you don't have three or four different, contending open source RDBMS installed.

And so we return to the original advice: engage a consultant.

My personal favorite is RedMine, but the last time I chedked they didn't support FreeBSD too well, and there was that horrible dependency upon Ruby.

Many people like Trac, but the last time I looked, it didn't have security.