Question

I would like to be able to mark cases that I need to follow up on within the next X hours or days.

The scenario is: A customer contacts me via email and case gets created. I fire an email back at the customer via fogbugz. Now, my mail may get lost in a spam filter or the customer may just plain forget to check his mail or whatever.

I would like to be able to make fogbugz notify me after a few days, that if I haven't heard back from the customer I should get it touch with him by some other means than email.

As it stands, my fogbugz user has 150+ cases assigned to it, so I might not get around to looking at each of those often enough, to notice cases that must be followed up on in a timely manner.

Is this possible in fogbugz, or do I have to look into writing a plugin?

Answer 1

It sounds like the due dates and escalation reports field might be what you're after:

To insure that email is responded to promptly, FogBugz can set a due date for every mail message that comes in. This is configured for each mailbox under Admin -> Mailboxes.

When you set a due date, you can set it in absolute time, e.g. 4 hours. But realistically, unless you provide 24x7 customer service, you'll probably want to set due dates in working hours or days.

Example:

• Your office hours are 9-5 Monday through Friday, and you strive to reply to customer email within 4 working hours.
• If a message comes in at 4:00 pm on Friday, it will be due at 12:00 noon on Monday, because that is 4 working hours later.
• If Monday is a company holiday, that message would be due at 12:00 noon on Tuesday.

Any FogBugz administrator can set up your company working schedule using Admin -> Site Working Schedule. You can set up the days of the week when you work, the hours of each day when you work, and you can provide a list of holidays when you don't work at all.

Escalation Reports

Anyone can sign up to receive escalation reports via email, by checking the appropriate box on the Options screen. An escalation report is sent early every morning, and lists all cases which are either overdue or which will become due that day.

If you are using FogBugz AutoSort to block spam, escalation reports will not include cases that have been sorted as spam, because all due dates are removed from cases in this area.

To look a bit further into the future, you can set up a filter to list bugs that are going to be due sometime in the future and sort that filter by due date. For example, you might set up a filter listing all cases due in the next 2 weeks, in order by due date, and check that filter regularly.