My company is a custom development shop for a number of projects, some larger and some smaller. Currently we handle all of our client communication through email. So we email a design doc, they mark it up and send it back. Then we roll out a beta version of their product and they email us with any bugs, new features, etc. And so on....
As I am working on implementing a new bug tracking system (it looks like it will be Mantis right now), I got to wondering how we could best allow our customers an interface with our development process that would provide better tracking of feature requests and client submitted bugs as well as communicate our responses back to the client.
If anyone is aware of a a bug tracking system that does this exceptionally well I'd be interested to hear of that. Otherwise I'm just looking for some general guidelines or good business practices that have allowed your companies to interface effectively and efficiently with your clients.
UPDATE: My company uses a LAMPP stack and as we are a small shop with a limited budget we tend to stick to tools that are open-source and free.
Do most people either use Team Foundation Server to handle this or emails back and forth?
Although I know of no specific tools (at least no open source ones), I suggest that you setup a system which will cover your overall requirements gathering and implementation process. Requirements could be tracked in the system, which would also contain the design documents (which could be "checked out from" and "committed to" the system). This way, you would tackle the problem of having multiple revisions of design documents around. Addionally, the design documents and the requirements could be tracked easily. If this system were linked to your source code management system, you would additionally ease your development process/requirements tracking.