Question

I have an idea for a productivity enhancement addon for FogBugz.

Email is a big problem - mostly because it's not public. Important decision making threads and project-related knowledge in the organization is forever lost in inboxes, PSTs, archives, etc. *

I don't think we can make people stop using email - it's too easy and familiar. What I want to do instead is code some email bot that gets CC'ed on conversations and then publishes these conversations as wiki articles or discussion topics. People could still use email to start up conversations, but as soon as they realize that the discussion is something that other/future team members would find useful to read, they can start CCing the bot, or just forward the conversation to it.

Thus, project-related discussions are automatically made public and searchable through FB, while still using the familiar medium of email.

So far I came up with this:

1. We open a mailbox for each project in FB.
2. Write an Exchange plugin that reads email, or even a POP client.
3. The bot parses conversations and then edits FB with the latest input - it can be a wiki page in the style of a conversation (nice, cause it's editable), or it use the discussion group feature.
4. ?
5. Profit

So my question is: Is the XML API sufficiently powerful to allow me to code this? Can I edit wiki pages and/or discussion topics in such a way? What other tips can you provide for me when trying to implement this thing?

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• We use wiki heavily in our organization, but it's not a proper way to hold discussions. We also have some issues with the built-in discussion forum feature, so we don't use it. What we end up doing is creating FB cases, tagging them as discussion, and then editing them with replies. Hardly the ideal solution.

Answer 1

Seems like StackExchange is a great solution for this.

Email usage is ingrained, yes, but we've found that if you give people an easy, flexible, well-designed way to get their work done, they'll prefer that to email.

EDIT: FogBugz is never going to replace email and never going to be a substitute for open discussion. We dogfood like crazy and still use things like SurveyMonkey, company-wide emails, Laconica, etc. for internal communication. If there was a way for FogBugz to do these things, we'd have it doing them.

The API is probably powerful enough to do what you want (to actually answer your original question), but it sounds really hard.