Question

We just recently bought HelpStar as a HelpDesk software for our company to be customer facing and was a better fit for our sales support and computer and network support departments. It's not the best solution for my team however (software development.) I don't want to have two systems running that people who submit tickets/cases will need to go too and at the same time we're looking into using FogBugz for the developers.

What I would like to see is this. Someone can create a ticket in Helpstar and it automatically creates a ticket in FogBugz. The developers can work directly through FogBugz and it will update the Helpstar ticket. Thus allowing the developers to work only in FogBugz and other people working through Helpstar.

I know it sounds like a lot. :) I'm trying to avoid having to work through two systems. Otherwise does anyone have any information for how they handle similar situations?

Answer 1

"Does FogBugz integrate with..." questions are tricky, because integrations are often customized to the individual setup. There is no cookie-cutter way to do two-way linking like this, but there are two powerful tools available to you to build your own solution:

FogBugz XML API

The XML API allows a remote app to interact with FogBugz, performing (almost) any action a user can perform in the web UI. If HelpStar is extensible in that you can have it make http requests upon actions in it, you can have HelpStar use an administrator logon token to create and edit cases in FogBugz, impersonating the appropriate user.

FogBugz Plugin Architecture

The Plugin Architecture in FogBugz 7 allows you to implement interfaces to hook into various parts of FogBugz and change and add to various behaviors. You can write a plugin which hooks into bug editing (IPluginBugCommit) and fires off requests to an external API (in HelpStar) to keep your cases in sync.