Question

I have hunted around this site to find out how to manage customers gaining access to FB features. A frustration I have is that many of the questions were asked & answered before FB 8 came out, and some even mention about things being different when FB is released. (See note at the end)

We host our own FB on our own server.

We have a project that our customer wants to be able to:

1. Create new cases
2. See the progress of the case (not sure exactly what this means in practice, but we are thinking of, for example, seeing it as being assigned, due date, priority etc)
3. Add extra details to a case
4. See all cases reported by the various users at the customer site.

This particular customer is a single company, but with perhaps 4 or 5 different people having contact with us. These people will want to see cases from their colleagues (i.e. requirement 4).

From what I have gleaned, it appears that 1-3 should all be possible via email inboxes. I just set up an inbox, and away we go?

But the problem with that is that the emails sent back to the customer include a URL to allow them to track the case. We don't expose FB to the outside world, and so would we need to put in some kind of proxying in order for that link to work? Any recommendations of what we may need to set up?

The fourth requirement is what mainly prompted this question. Questions elsewhere on this site mention the Community Case plugin. But this was a pre-FB 8 thing, and so has it now been superseded by FB8's group enhancments?

Our customer has indicated they may want something more direct than the email system. Is this were community users come in? How does this work with the previous point? At what point would we need to decide to buy full licenses for these users? I.e. what can't a community user do?

What restrictions are there with our server being only on our network, and not exposed to the outside world? A potential problem, for example, is that URL's returned by emails from FB that work locally for us, might then not work on a proxy.

So, given the requirements, what is the current recommended best mechanism for customers to use FB as a support portal?

Apologies for the rather rambling nature of the question, but it directly reflects the rather rambling nature of the documentation on this site :)

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Note: My needing to ask this question I think highlights the fact that answers are not kept up to date. With FB having so little documentation, all we really have is this Stack Exchange site, and it makes it very time consuming to trawl through lots of questions, many of which have timed out. Maybe I should make a new case about this?

Answer 1

Sorry for the slow reply. If you need quick answers, it's best to contact us directly.

The long and short of it is that we don't have a set answer for every "distance" people want to keep their customers at. Everyone wants something different. There's no stock solution, so you should contact us for a consultation. For instance, we are currently looking at writing a plugin for a customer that allows a subset of FogBugz users to only create cases and only edit cases assigned to them (assigned back for more detail). That might be useful here. Or you might just want them to be regular users.

A community user can't see any internal edits on a case, can't see other cases submitted by other users. A normal user can see cases in projects their group has access to and edit them if they have modify permissions. For your situation, in order to get what you want, you'll need to expose the install to the outside, create user accounts and groups for the customers (and segment them into their own groups).

Sorry, I don't have any help on how to proxy FogBugz to the outside world. I think you'll just have to put it in a DMZ.