I have been mulling over this for a long time so I thought I'd start a post and see where it went, and I'll keep this up to date (or write an article) if I get somewhere with it. I am the sole developer in an IT team of 5, our other main function therefore is systems admin and support for all IT systems within the office (other than printer maintenance which is out-sourced). I wrote our in-house fault-logging/issue tracking application in ASP.Net but it's lacking some features we need (I was only learning when I worte it!), and I want to do a complete re-write in SharePoint as this seems like a sensible place to host such a solution as we begin to make more and more use of SharePoint.

I like the look of the Issues list in WSS and would like to use it as a simple fault logging system. However 'out of the box' it doesnt have everything we'd need and I'm going to have to extend it somewhat:

For example

1. I would prefer the ' Assign to' drop-down list to only list site administrators (or users with some other specific level of permission) rather than every user of the site - or be some other form of custom look-up that could be configured.
2. I would prefer the notification email to also be cc' d to the user logging the issue. That way the person to whom the call has been assigned can quickly ' Reply to All' so that everyone involved knows what' s going on. The other (even better) solution to this would be if the system could automatically create an alert for the user logging the issue (and maybe even the person who has been assigned the issue) to be notified of changes to the issue (with maybe a quick link to an opt-out to this alert).
3. It would be nice if this could be somehow be linked to tasks, either in a task list in WSS or in Outlook (i.e. the person who has the issue assigned to them also has a new task created for them). I had already written a post on using an issues list and a tasks list connected via two web parts but I saw some limitations with this approach which I outlined, and would need to be resolved.

on Javascript 'listeners' which sounds like just the kind of thing I'm looking for in point (2) but I'm not too sure just yet what Andrew is using these listeners for so I'm going to ask!... more to come...

Update: a while ago I printed off an article by Mark Bower at Microsoft on how to customise the context-menu for list items, but all I can find now is this article which is not quite as friendly but it gives you a starting point. It occurs to me that you could use this for a 'send email to person who logged the fault' function. Not quite as nice as the solution I hoped for in point (2) but better than nothing.

Update2: Mark Bower has since posted about this on his blog. Here's a link to his updated article