fogbugz vs. OTRS - fogbugz

I'm looking for a simple solution for support case management. The final nominees are Fogbugz and the open source OTRS.

Hai ofer,
I have used fogbugz for all my web application test cases... It has good version control which be very useful to graph your cases from the day of first test to the latest version....
Individual logins from admin and users would be best suited for assigning,reopening and closing cases....
FogBugz makes it simple to enter bug reports and other types of cases.

Also a FogBugz user. I use it for:
Integrating with SVN for Bugz update assignment to cases
Have an email inbox set up (cases#xxx/fogbugz.com) to allow end-users to submit email (either via their email client or through automation)
I use their API to allow bug submissions through our UI
Managing my team. I categoriese something as "Design", and it goes to our designer
Along with the excellent filtering of cases which allows you to get a snapshot based on any criteria you can think of. It's also really good at concurrency, so if changes occur on a ticket while you're looking at it, you are notified.

Related

Anonymous contact form iOS app

I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!

In Atlassian Jira 4.1.2 how can I make a profile that may only view users of the system?

Experience with Jira is based on what I have seen from clicking through the project. There is no knowledge transfer as all people who knew this customized system left over a year ago.
As for the Atlassian PDF guide, it is not able to assist because the feature to add users and manage the users in Jira have been removed. An external LDAP system is where the users are managed.
I can view the User Browser and see users and do some editing of a profile and even delete the user from a navigation link in the footer.
But the real question at hand is, what do I need to do in order to
A. Assign users to an Organization Role that only allows them
1: A view only mode of the users in that Organization
2: View the details of the user and that users permissions/roles given
I've been looking for a few days now and just keep running into brick walls.
Thank you.
The upgrading of the system to the new version is not an option due to the extensive undocumented modifications made to Jira. It has been tried 3 times in the past 2 years without success.
I am answering based on JIRA 5.2 and higher experience.
Only place to see list of users is User Manager and you need to be JIRA admin to access it. So it's not a solution for you.
I searched for addon doing this but no luck. Moreover your JIRA is too old to be supported by addon providers.
The same story with JIRA REST API. Looks like for JIRA 4.1 you need to use JIRA REST 1.0 (current is 2.0) and I can not find docs for it.
I believe it's possible to write the addon to accomplish what you need but again it's not smart to invest in obsolete JIRA.
The most right solution is still migrate to the newest version of JIRA. Maybe you need abandon the undocumented changes or rewrite them into JIRA addons. It will not be easy and it can be costly but looks like you do not have too many options.
Task has been abandoned.
No answer to bad implementation and poor engineering practices when one is to continue to follow them.
I'd delete the post entirely but I'd rather give credit to the few that tried to provide some insight. Thanks again.

Discussions and email notifications on TFS tasks

We're new to TFS and have some tasks set up in Team Explorer. It seems the History pane is the right/best place to add notes/discussions (although it's very different from other tools I'm used to like bugzilla, jira, redmine)?
But how can we set it up so interested parties get notified of new comments on a task, preferably by email? We're all making it up as we go along with no prior TFS experience but I'd hope my experience with other tools (the project hasn't used a proper issue tracker before) would help me figure things out but it all seems rather confusing.
If you install the TFS 2010 Power Tools (this is removed for 2012 as it's setup in the web interface according to this link although I've not played with this in 2012), under Team > Alerts Explorer you can add alerts for email notifications.
It's pretty simple, you can get alerts for when work items are modified, created under a certain path, assigned to you etc, they are basically configured in a similar way to the work item queries so it's quite easy to setup what you want.
They can be setup by any users, so you might want to let your users setup their own custom rules as they like, then you logon as a generic user (such as your admin user) to setup team specific queries, or else you might end up with users complaining about getting emails no longer relevent to them or need changing, when the user that set them up leaves/moves etc... Else you'll be hunting round to find who setup the original rules.

TFS2010 Customer access via internet Website

Wondering if its possible (technically and licensing) to create a website for a Customer to view reports, report bugs, track progress of products we are creating for them (we are using VS2010 and TFS2010).
Cheers, Nick.
Hopefully one of the MSFT guys will weigh in here, but if I recall, providing access to "real-time" data via a web site is not allowed. Putting static data into a status report is allowed, I believe, as long as the person creating the data has a CAL.
There's an exception to the CAL requirement for creating work items and the subsequent view of those work items. This would allow non CAL-ed users to be able to submit things like bug reports.
From a technical standpoint-- yeah, it is not only possible, but relatively easy to do with the API.

Automating Account Disabling in JIRA

I've been reading some feature request-style threads in Atlassian's own JIRA install on how to disable (not remove) users in JIRA, and their suggested solution involves a series of UI actions. For the number of users that our organization supports, this needs to be automated with the rest of our employee account provisioning logic.
I've been looking in the JIRA database and found the membershipbase table, but simply removing records from here WHERE USER_NAME="$username" doesn't seem to have a completely successful outcome. When I go to the User Browser in the Administration section and look up that user, groups still appear for the user.
Does anyone have any experience with this that could point me in the right direction on any other tables I need to modify?
Thanks in advance,
-aj
Maybe you should take a look at Atlassian's Crowd. Even if you don't use SSO, it may help you to integrate with your existing infrastructure for handling authentication and authorization (i.e. groups) centrally. It also provides an administrative frontend that is designed for the corresponding tasks.
You could have a look at the EditUserGroups.setGroupsToLeave() method. As far as I remember, users need to be in the jira-users group to log in. So, if you remove this group from the user, it may be effectively what you need (not delete but deactive user acount).
If this does not help, I'd look into the source code of JIRA (which is available for all types of licenses afaik) to see which tables are modified by the above method.

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