Question

We would like to set up several "non-developer" users to interact with FogBugz. They shouldn't need the full functionality of FogBugz, so we'd like to figure out how to do this without using up one of our licensed seats. What are our options?

Answer 1

You've got a few different directions you can try to take, but at the end of the day, if you want someone to be a full user of FogBugz (i.e. be able to log in and edit cases, manage projects, etc.), that user will need to be a "normal user" in FogBugz with a purchased seat. Let's look at a few different options that you could piece together in a number of ways.

Full User

FogBugz is great for managing a body of work related to a project. While this of course makes sense for software development, people use it for all kinds of situations that may be only tangentially or not-at-all related to software development. If you want people to be able to work within FogBugz as a first-class user, managing and editing cases, that would require a full user license. Even if that person is not a developer, they are still fully utilizing FogBugz. With FogBugz On Demand, you only pay for the high water mark of users in any given month and you can activate/deactivate users, so you can ratchet up the number of users as you need them and remove them as needed. See also: User Administration and User Accounts

Community Users

A community user can add cases to a project if they have permissions for that project and they can view cases that they have submitted as well. When they view a case, they can only see the email events in the case, not regular edits. This can be enhanced with the Community Case List plugin, which provides a view of all cases in a project that they are granted permissions to. In this way, a user could interact with FogBugz content, but they wouldn't be able to directly edit any cases. See also: User Administration and User Accounts

Mailbox

You can set up separate Mailboxes for individual projects. This allows people to create and reply to cases via e-mail. The ideal workflow for this would be a team of people who need to correspond to users on a case-by-case basis. It's not intended as an overall project collaboration mechanism, but I suppose the process could be hacked to work that way. See also: Handling Incoming Customer Email, Using FogBugz to check POP3 and IMAP mailboxes, and Public Access to Email Cases

Custom Development

You have the ability to customize FogBugz via Plugins or the XML API. The XML API requires a user, so I'd recommend purchasing at least one seat for your automated "user" that accesses the XML API. If you wanted to, you could expose information related to cases via the API. This allows you to create an interface that's as complex or simple as you feel you need.