1

2

What's the best way to use FogBugz to communicate with customers and other non-licensed users?

flag
I feel External Customer handling is a weakness of fogbugz. The answer here is good: it does give a good flavour for methods of handling customers, but all are weak. The email bug interface seems complex and "different" when it would be nice to give them "customer" logins. But unless a customer is paying a subscription or recurring fee it's not possible to afford a paid-for login per customer. A big client of mine (who introduced me to fogbugz) has just dumped fogbugz for an inferior cheaper solution for just that reason, which makes me sad. And I'm now suffering from the same issue. – Andy Henson Jan 7 2011 at 10:41

1 Answer

2

FogBugz is designed to make it easy to receive bug reports, feature requests, and inquiries from external customers. There are three ways you can set this up.

1. Full Service Customers

In this scheme, customers submit inquiries via email, a web form, or the user interface of your software. They do not have access to the FogBugz system itself. Anyone with an account in FogBugz can send them an email message from FogBugz which will be logged with the case. If desired, other than the email messages these customers receive, they do not have any way of determining the status of their cases, because they did not set up an account and password.  Otherwise, customers can keep track of their submitted cases via the case ticket they will receive as confirmation.  Using this ticket, they can also view the status of all other cases they have submitted.

Typical uses: handling customer service email, handling executives who do not have time to learn about FogBugz and just need a question answered, etc.

2. Partner/Customers

In this scheme, you simply give a full FogBugz account to the customer. They can access FogBugz just like anyone else.

Typical uses: clients with whom you work closely who submit more than 1 case a week and are willing to create an account and learn their way around FogBugz.

If your customers only need basic status information on a case, you can set them up with a Community User account, which does not use a license. You can then use a plugin to provide them with a status page for the project.

3. Project Consulting Clients

This is for situations where you want clients to have full access to FogBugz, but each client's information is confidential and must be partitioned from other clients. Here you set up multiple installations of FogBugz side-by-side, probably on the same server with different URLs, and keep each client in their own separate FogBugz database. (Regarding licensing, your FogBugz licenses are tied to active named users, not to the number of FogBugz installations.)

Typical uses: consulting firms, web design firms, etc. who work with a limited number of high-contact customers.

link|flag
What about FogBugz on Demand ... it's cheap to create multiple FoD installations for students/startups, but is that OK with you? I guess multiple FoD installations is not typical option for paying customers, is it? – Peter Štibraný Oct 16 2009 at 7:37

Your Answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.