Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: A Customer's Self-Service Interface to Bug Tracker!?!

Why don't you use a subsite for each customer and a bug tracker instance on each? This would save you all the permission work. At least this is how we do it on our sites (albeit not with the connection to bug tracker, just the project-manager with automatic OpenOffice invoicing (invoices and contacts) for hours done).

Promotion is a good question. Probably the usual channels you are using for ]po[ (gosh, the previous name was much easier to type) anyway?

I agree with Malte. This package does sounds useful, especially the time tracking integration and invoicing. I can think of a few clients that could benefit from features like this.

Malte: how does your "Automatic OpenOffice invoicing" with pm work?

Hi,

Why don't you use a subsite for each customer and a bug
tracker instance on each?

Good point, we've been thinking about that. This makes definitely sense if the customer's bug trackers are independent from each other. Like when you're developing custom functionality for each customer.

However, atleast in our case we've got a single "Product" (]project-open[) that is shared amongst several hundered customers. And we've got a single development team that deals with all of the bugs. So we'd either need a "unified view" to all the different bug trackers or we'd need the above mentioned permission scheme.

But it's a good question: Do our target customers develop only a single product (product companies), or do they develop independent custom projects (service companies)? I guess that the majority are service companies...

Still, we don't work with "subsites" (]po[ consists of ~50 singleton packages), so that option wouldn't work for us.

However, we're planning to support multiple bug trackers for companies that are maintaining more then one "product". Then we'd assign the correct prodcut to each customer.

OpenOffice invoicing

Yes, that would be interesting to learn about...

Probably the usual channels you are using for ]po[

Yeah, that's the easy one. But I was thinking about all of these PHP and Ruby guys that are looking for BugZilla, phProject etc. How to get the message through to them that there is a "superior" system around (OpenACS, naturally...)? Just getting an idea: What about posting on _their_ community pages and asking them to take a survey to inquire about their opinions or to compare the systems? Would be a pretty bold move, I guess...

Thanks for the feedback Malte!
Frank

In general this is how it works at the moment:

Installed packages:

- project-manager
- contacts
- invoices

Two options:

- Use .LRN, then you have one community per customer. The unified looks work well through the portlets
- Use individual subsites. Then you are missing the unified view (at the moment), but don't have to deal with .LRN

Each project has an offer with offer_items. Once a task is closed, a callback inserts the logged hours as new offer_item with the unit = logged hours and the price per unit taken from the price list. As you can have default logger descriptions you can link them to the pricelist in the callback.

Once a project is closed, it is marked billable and

1) A new invoice is generated automatically by inserting the offer information into the invoice tables and calling iv_invoice::parse_data with some contacts::oo::import_pdf magic to generate the invoice

2) The billing department manually takes a look at all closed projects from a customer and generates an invoice across multiple projects (this is the reason why you have both "offers" and "invoices").

iv_invoice::parse_data sets the invoice variables and uses a special OO template (content.xml) which contains ADP commands (e.g. multiple) to generate a table with the invoice. The resulting content.xml is saved with zip in the invoice.odt file which is stored in /tmp.

contacts::oo::import_pdf then runs your OO Pdf converter of choice and stores the generated PDF in the invoice folder of the client.

All invoices can be sent via direct e-mail to the customer. Alternatively you can get a joined PDF with all invoices to you inbox if you want to print the invoices and mail them by snail mail.

Electronic signature for invoice PDFs is also on the "todo" list for the mediate term. Again there are a couple of approaches for this.

Hope this helps.