I've done similar. Last couple of years I've been using Redmine for issue tracking. (Hint: Run under JRuby with glassfish gem and don't use sqlite.) IM has gen

I've done similar. Last couple of years I've been using Redmine for issue tracking. (Hint: Run under JRuby with glassfish gem and don't use sqlite.) IM has generally worked better than email, prefering to keep useful chunky data in redmine as a "knowledge base". IM has also worked to keep the users involved.