I have a small software project with a couple clients. What I'm looking for something with the following abilities:
clients can submit feature requests, bugs, or tasks
clients can see the status of open and closed issues
clients can see a change log
a place for me to post updates or news
Nice to haves:
clients can only see the issues that
they've posted; not other clients'
a hosted solution
So far, the choices seem overwhelming. I've looked at Mantis and Hiveminder. Unfuddle seems pretty close. I've avoided FogBugz for the price (and it seems like overkill) and Trac as I'm trying to avoid hosting something myself. Most of the existing solutions seem to be geared towards a team of developers and not for developer-client relations. Anyone have any recommendations?
I know that you said you'd rejected FogBugz -- but your description makes it sound like this might be a solo development effort. Have you considered the free Student and Startup Edition of Fogbugz?
I ended up going with Mantis. Its per project permissions actually works out pretty well for multiple exclusive clients.
Take a look at uservoice.com and getsatisfaction.com - probably what you need. It's not positioned as bug-tracking, so you won't have complex workflows or permission schemes, I guess, but maybe that's right for a small team.
Igor
Related
The company I work for pretty much uses a subsonic DAL for everything we do.
I recently noticed that the domain was released.
So is subsonic dead?
The domain does seem dead. Their github repository is still online though, with most recent activity from a month ago. The author Rob has a blog but he doesn't seem to have addressed his poor domain, though he does seem to acknowledge that it hasn't seen much attention from him.
For all your info, the domain is back up (probably got lost in the flood of Rob's inbox).
I put a lot of time in Jan-Feb 2012 into fixing up all the outstanding bugs in SubSonic 2, including patching, fixing or removing a lot of the failing unit tests (there were quite a few), actioning outstanding pull requests, and generally giving it a good tune up.
I had also added an MS Access provider and an auto enum generator to it.
But SS2 is very much 'mature' now, and I can't see much happening to it apart from bug fixes. That said, now that the help resources are back up, it's still a great and complete package. If there's not much active patching, that may be because it doesn't need any.
SS3 takes the project in a very different direction. I'm happy using it, but as with all these things, I mainly concentrate on what I can do WITH it rather than the tool itself. There is a pretty big backlog of outstanding stuff on SS3, and I'm not up with or even that keen on LINQ, so not sure how I'd go trying to fix anything to do with that.
And Rob has moved on to Massive, his .NET 4 dynamic tool.
UPDATE: The actual official SubSonic site is at: subsonic.wekeroad.com
Subsonicproject.com is a secondary site previously registered by contributor Eric Kemp, fallen to domain sqatters, largely broken. I nearly fell over when Rob told me this.
YES!
Rest in peace, my old friend :(
I have a client who has been using WebOffice (from WebEx) for a variety of tasks within their small organization. The problem is that they only really need a small subset of the features WebOffice provides (Contact list, Database, and Document Storage).
They've asked me to develop a website focused on these three features with the rationalization that this should be more cost-effective, since they currently aren't using many of the features of WebOffice they pay for.
What are some open-source alternatives that I could implement for them? Sharepoint sounds like it would be too bloated and Google Apps may not be as collaborative as they would like.
We looked at sharepoint and went like "meh". Anything interesting you want to do with it requires prohibitive licensing, and if you expose any piece of it to the internet then the cost just blows any budget away.
We are piloting a deployment of Alfresco, with KnowledgeTree also being a very decent option, IMO. As for the main site, something like OpenAtrium looks like a pretty decent and flexible fit without much configuration needed. OpenAtrium is based on Drupal.
SharePoint sounds like a good match? Did whoever told you it was bloated also mention why?
You might only need WSS which is free (if you have Windows Server).
My company hosts LumiPortal (www.lumiportal.com) which is similar to WebOffice but with drive letters for storage. If you have inhouse technical expertise, then on the open source side we see Joomla and Drupal, which could be thought of as classic content management systems. If you have in-house technical expertise, you might look at Drupal and their document management component first.
Call WebOffice customer service and tell them. They will probably adjust your payment options to suit your needs.
There's a good roundup of online collaboration/office suites here although it is a bit dated now.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_office_2007_year_in_review.php
Webex WebOffice hasn't been updated in 5 years and has been sunset by Webex with no migration path (confirmed in their forums) so I would get off it ASAP.
With the addition of Wave to Google Apps it would seem to be a much more cost effective and modern replacement.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
My company is planning to start a forum for our software product which the clients can refer for general FAQ's, problems etc.
Right now we are planning to have:-
User manuals.
Best practices for different section's of the application
Frequently faced problems.
Forum where user can discuss issues with development team.
Any other ideas?
Edit:-
We have RSS and E-mail notification subscription to the forum.
Forum where user can discuss issues
with development team.
I don't know if this is a euphemism for "issue tracker" but if not, make sure you include a way for people to submit bug/feature/enhancement reports and track them to completion. Nothing is worse than not being able to submit a bug report or being able to submit a bug report but only into a black hole.
Communication is key.
If you add an issue tracker as suggested by Kevin, your list seems pretty ok to me.
I'd also suggest that you do not start out with too many different services that require interaction from your side (e.g. your developers) at first - I've seen (too) many good initiatives die simply because nobody in the company had enough time e.g. for regular answering of the forum questions.
In your case, I guess "best practices", "frequent problems" and the forum will all consume regular time from your dev team if you want to keep them alive and up-to-date, especially in the beginning. So I would not add more services at the beginning but make sure to get these right (and you can always add more services later on if you find that the users need them :-).
You.
Show that you care about your customers.
Many useful tips at Creating passionate users blog.
I am looking for a simple system to manage inbound emails from a support mailbox for a group with about 3 support people. I've looked at OTRS which seems to have the features that we need. Unfortunately, so far the UI still looks like a confusing mess.
Are there any good FOSS tools that would meet this need? I've heard murmurings that something called fooogzeeebugzo might have similar features, but it seems quite expensive for such simple needs.
Did you try IssueBurner? It was designed for this purpose. You can forward your mailbox (e.g. support#yourcompany.com) to a IssueBurner group and you can track the inbound mails until they are closed.
Here is a link to their video: http://issueburner.com/a/video
I have to agree, Fogbugz is probably the best out there. I have used both the hosted version and the purchased version which I hosted. It is top-notch.
BugTracker.NET is free, open source, and widely used. It has integration with incoming email. In other words, it will accept an incoming email and turn it into a support ticket.
My company recently started using Mojo Helpdesk: www.mojohelpdesk.com. It's a hosted service, not FOSS, but it's pretty cheap and the interface is slick.
TicketDesk- C# issue tracking system and support system
http://www.codeplex.com/TicketDesk
TicketDesk is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible.
TicketDesk is an asp.net web application written in C# targeting the .net 3.5 framework. It includes a simple database with support for SQL 2005 Express or SQL Server 2005. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.
RT - Request Tracker handles inbound mail. I'm working to add inbound mail support to TicketDesk, but that might be a little while before that makes it into a release.
FogBugz is great as others have mentioned. I use it for my bug/feature tracking system, but I like to separate out my support ticketing system for my support staff to use. Another tool that has great email integration also is called HelpSpot, they have hosted and non-hosted versions for purchase, depending on your budget. It has a lot of great features, that make the prices worth it. Take the tour and see for yourself.
Scope out SmarterTrack, Help Desk Software from SmarterTools:
We use FogBugz...er, "fooogzeeebugzo"...and while it may be a bit expensive for your needs, it works very well.
bugzilla is more of an issue tracker than a request tracker, but it can be configured to handle email-based status tracking. That said, I think Steven has it- RT is the standard recommendation for this that I've seen.
The on-demand version of Fogbugz is a pretty cheap option for just a few people, and works really well. We did that for a while before moving it inhouse.
I've used fogbugz for over 12 months now and more and more I'm finding one of the most valuable features is the in built email support. I've got an on demand account and I'm finding more and more that I don't even check my email in the morning as all my business correspondence is put straight into fogbugz.
I realize that FOSS is your primary desire and I definitely agree with this. If I were to limit myself to FOSS, I would go with RT 3.8, http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots
However, if you are willing to entertain commercial solutions and are looking for a Helpdesk-"ish" application. I just deployed WebHelpDesk with great success at my current employment, where I am the primary sysadmin and Corporate IT person. They just released a new version, 9.1.1 and it is very well done. The email integration is superb and beyond what I have seen with most other FOSS and commercial issue/bug trackers, given that it is built to run a Helpdesk and not be a software or source code issue tracker. It runs on Windows and *nix, they have a great demo and you can obtain a 30 day trial installer. I have become a big fan of this software and think it has a reasonable price of $250/year/technician (support person).
If you want more info on how we deployed it, please email me and I'd be happy to discuss it at length. I have no more connection with them than I am a very happy customer.
Thanks for all the tips. For the moment, I am looking heavily at eTicket as it was trivial to setup and seems to be developing nicely at the moment. I may look at RT as well, though.
I'll second the suggestion for RT. See my post here for more thoughts and details on our setup.
From my personal experience I can recommend using Bridgetrak.
It works pretty smooth in our environment and includes rich helpdesk functionality for powerful tickets tracking.
I have a lot of experience using this tools - feel free to ask any questions!
As most of the answers are a little bit outdated, I would definitely recommend OsTicket (http://osticket.com/), a great open source project that offers lots of customization and a user friendly interface.
I have been using it for the last two years and I would rather choose OsTicket than OTRS or RT.