Question

If I have a case that is to be completed by someone outside the company who is not on my Fogbugz account, how should I put that into Fogbugz? Should I assign it to a virtual user? Do I just need to set that virtual user to Inactive until that vendor is turned on, at which point I set the virtual user to Active?

An example would be procuring something from a vendor, where the wait time matters for the project, but no one in my company would be charging time to that case (they would be working on something else in the mean time).

Answer 1

The case(s) being assigned to a virtual user should not impact EBS. If there's a hard start date, you might want to consider a putting these into a milestone of their own and creating both a start date and a milestone dependency. That's pretty much the exact thing we were trying to allow for with these two features.

Answer 2

Personally, I would setup cases like this with an orientation toward your users. I would make the case an action you need to take instead of one the vendor needs to. For example, if you are waiting for a part, instead of the case "Deliver part" assigned to a virtual user "Vendor", I would title the case "Ensure part delivery" and assign it to the person in your company responsible for either managing the vendor or performing the next task which depends on the vendor. This way all of your cases are accountable within your group of users for tracking.

If you prefer, I think a system of cases assigned to vendor virtual users is a good idea. You can periodically view filters of cases which are due and assigned to them in order to follow up, and when you list all cases in a milestone, you will see them there as well.

Since you won't be performing actual work for the case (the vendor is), I wouldn't put an estimate on it for EBS. Instead, you can set a start date dependency for a milestone containing all work that depends on that vendor if it is truly blocking.