Small businesses already invested in Azure DevOps can repurpose its Boards feature for a lightweight ticketing system. This approach offers a practical solution for managing internal requests without incurring extra licensing fees. It functions as a basic helpdesk for teams with simple workflows, though it's not a full replacement for dedicated ITSM platforms like ServiceNow or Jira Service Management.

To begin, you need a free Azure DevOps organization and a Microsoft Entra tenant. The setup involves creating a custom process to hide unnecessary development fields and adding specific ones like 'Category' or 'SLA Target'. You'll also define work item types such as 'Incident' and 'Request' while setting stakeholder access for end users.

Once configured, you can build distinct boards for customers and support agents. These boards can feature swimlanes for prioritizing urgent tickets and provide a clear view of assigned work. For notifications, the native system requires manual user tagging. However, you can automate alerts to Microsoft Teams using Power Automate, bridging the communication gap effectively.