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Communication with customers / third party vendors

Added by Michael Mezger almost 14 years ago

Hello everyone,

first of all i wanna praise this wonderful project. its awesome and fantastic, thanks everyone for this lot of work.

Now, on topic: We are a small project-based software comapny with a few projects at the same time. We are handling around 5-10 projects at once. Redmine is our central PM-Software to plan projects (creating tasks, assigning, ...) and communicating within the team. For some bigger projects we included customers for better communication. But for smaller Projects (duration ~4-6 weeks) or "critical" customers we dont add the customer to the project. In this case, all communications is handled by emails. Im just wondering how you are handling external communications to customers or third party vendors. I`m now thinking about a way to improve this communication process.

At the moment we c&p ticket-relation emails into the ticket, but thats fault prone. so i wonder if there es a redmine-integrated way to communicate based on tickets via email to customers and other people. It could work as follow:

  • Within a Ticket (or dettached from tickets) you could create a "email-message"
  • The recipient replies and the reply will automatically attached to the origin message
  • You could replay again and so on...
  • Within the ticket, you see the detailed message history (thats important, with redmine notifications you dont see when and who recieved emails)

Maybe you know the otrs project (otrs.org). OTRS works just this way. (Our second business unit uses otrs, and it works, but they dont do project-business)

so, maybe there is already a solution, or any hints..?

thx & greets


Replies (6)

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by Stefan H Singer almost 14 years ago

e-mail notifications within redmine, if set up to also receive e-mails, basically does this for you.

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by O G almost 14 years ago

Michael:

This is the system I just tested locally and it seems to work for an org that has both internal projects and external projects where internal projects can be seen only by internal folks, and each external project can be seen only by its users:

http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/20968

The drawback I see that this essentially means "Make All Projects Private", which cripples internal work a bit because internal folks now can't become aware of new projects or recent activity. They have to be explicitly added to each and every project.

Maybe I'm not seeing an option that would eliminate this drawback?

Thanks,
Otis

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by Michael Mezger almost 14 years ago

Hello Otis,

we also have internal and external projects, but our configuration works very well. here is our approach:

  • authentication is basically for all members required (no public viewing of projects)
  • Internal employees has administration rights (for this reason, they dont have to be assigned to the projects)
  • Customers hasnt administration rights, they are assigned to their projects

This works very well, but thats actually not my problem:

  • I want to communicate with third persons, who doesnt exist in redmine

greets

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by Stefan H Singer almost 14 years ago

You wan't to communicate with them via redmine, but they're not users in redmine? Why? Just add them as users? :)

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by O G almost 14 years ago

Hi Michael - this sounds good.

I imagine internal people could also get some some can-see-and-modify-all-projects role that is not full Administrator role, too, and still achieve the same flexibility you describe, right?

Oh, and in your case, each customer project is private, so no other customers can see it?

Do you also have that same Redmine configured to access your own SCM? No issues with putting such a Redmine instance on the Internet (even with authentication required for everyone)?

Thanks,
Otis

RE: Communication with customers / third party vendors - Added by Michael Mezger almost 14 years ago

yes, each project is private... and we also use redmine to access scm. not every project has SCM configured, but a few has SCM. We dont like, that customers can see our SCM / Source code, so we revoked the according right from the customer role.

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