Question

What are the key features of FogBugz's web-based discussion groups?

Answer 1

FogBugz gives you full-fledged discussion groups built in.

Each discussion group shows a list of topics:

Discussion groups can be private or public.

Private discussion groups are a great way to communicate in your team. Unlike private email, once conversations are captured in a discussion group, they will always be visible and searchable, capturing valuable development knowledge for posterity.

Public discussion groups are a great way to communicate with your customers and provide tech support for customers. The biggest advantage of communicating with your customers over a discussion group instead of email is that you won't have to repeat yourself so much, and there's a good chance that your customers will help each other solve problems before you have a chance to get to them.

When a customer posts something to a discussion group that you want to follow up on, you can click on a "New Case" link to create a case in FogBugz out of that post. This also creates a bidirectional link between the discussion topic and the case used to track it. You can use this to:

• create a case to track a bug reported by a customer in one step
• assign the discussion topic to a member of your team and make sure they reply to it
• gather interesting discussion topics in a project in FogBugz, for example, to track customer feature requests.