9

At my place of work, it has been decided to move many processes to Sharepoint. I'm now looking into how Sharepoint can be used for bug tracking (à la Mantis, FogBugz etc. but within Sharepoint). Specifically, we're using a collaboration room and the solution must work inside that.

I know that I can create lists using an "Issue tracker" template, but it lacks workflow, integrated correspondence (like FogBugz), and audit log (any user can edit any field any time, without it being noted anywhere).

That's not sufficient, so I am looking for "bigger" solutions but haven't yet found anything at all.
This question is similar but aims at Helpdesk use; we aim at bug tracking and change requests to a system.

I'm open to suggestions! As I'm not an administrator, I can't just grab a Sharepoint component and install it for testing. I'm looking for experiences, documentation, white papers, screen shots -- the actual downloadable will be relevant later.

Ideally, some of these matters should be covered:

  1. Support for different ticket types (bug, feature, inquiry, internal task).
  2. Configurable workflow per ticket type, no fixed number of steps.
  3. Configurable read/write permissions per field and per workflow status.
  4. Configurable dashboard for managers with nice charts.
  5. Configurable email notifications.
  6. Correspondence à la FogBugz. (Challenge: we use Notes, not Exchange.)
music2myear
  • 49,799
Torben Gundtofte-Bruun
  • 18,646

4 Answers4

2

Not sure if the template you mentioned was from here.. "SharePoint Templates"

SharePoint can be a challenge but does offer some great tools once you understand it. I belive it is one of the most challenging MS products I have seen but it is also very powerful. Have you checked Codeplex for SharePoint? Codeplex

Dave M
  • 13,250
1

Our team has used the MS SP bug tracking template on two projects. I would not consider the solution 'best of breed,' but it does work. You are able to add and remove fields as required, have a conversation with date stamps (using comments), and apply security (view/read/write). You can import and export the bug list to/from Excel.

Workflow can be added but it requires a developer (or a SP super user). The default configuration includes history tracking amd files attachments. As with any SP object, you can setup RSS feeds and e-mail notifications.

Given the choice, I would use a dedicated bug tracking package rather than the free solution offered by Microsoft. I haven't looked, but I'm sure that there are more complete bug tracking solutions that use SP as the back end.

Michaelkay
  • 831
1

SharePoint might answer your need as as simple ticket system.

However, I expect a bug tracker to be integrated with the source code (like if I comment a source change with "FIX bug #123", I want the ticket to be marked as "fixed" and be able to see the code diff).

Also, you don't have much flexibility around notifications, tracking time spent on a ticket, etc.

As such, I don't recommend SharePoint if you want to be serious about bug tracking.

rds
  • 127
1

In extension to DaveM's answer, I found documentation about the templates here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb848090.aspx

Specifically, these were interesting:

and this one for a more advanced setup:

I think I'll go with a combination of the first two. The latter seems too advanced for SP newbies and would be better suited to a much larger team.

Torben Gundtofte-Bruun
  • 18,646