Support Changes

Soon I will be overhauling the entire support process so that I can do a better job of managing customer issues. I'm convinced that hardly anyone is contacting me because it's obviously not obvious enough to do. Just recently, I had an email forwarded to me by one of my original testers which originated from another user who had some legitimate questions about how to get started with FuzzMeasure. Aside from the fact that I have to get my butt into gear and develop a better informational page about how to get started, I was concerned that this person did not know how to contact me directly. This user stated that they did not find any clear links on my page to contact me. All along, I've been relying on the "chris at supermegaultragroovy dot com" text plastered at the bottom of every product page. Clearly, that was not a very smart decision on my part. Contact information should be displayed much higher on my product pages. So, let's say I open the flood gates to manage all this customer contact. I'm sure I can probably handle about 10 or so emails a week, but I am not the most organized person in the world if all I have is a copy of Mail.app and an OmniOutliner document. This is where I hope that my latest purchase will give me a leg up. I finally grabbed a copy of FogBugz this morning in hopes of simplifying the support process. Once FogBugz 4.0 is released for UNIX hosts, I plan to remove the current forum software and replace it with the forum software that ships with FogBugz. The feature that really sealed the deal for me was email-generated issues, but that forum software will also link into my issue tracker and allow me to easily manage and respond to all the FuzzMeasure issues that come about. Up to now, I have not had the bug system really fully utilized. Not a single registered user of the software has filed a request, and a few that I've set up accounts for have never even logged in. I'm sure that if they get a simple email address to fire issues to, they'll be much more inclined to spout about everything that's missing. Right now, all of these issues show up in my mailbox, and I am unable to keep up with manually managing all the issues that pop out of these emails. Once I get FogBugz set up, all emails to this account will be instantly logged as issues (which I must respond to!). I can then respond to the issues as messages, flag them as feature requests, and they become a part of my todo list right away. Also, it will allow me to easily correlate similar requests together and generate actual feature requests and such. There is a lot of work that I have to do in the next little while to ensure that my support structure for FuzzMeasure 1.2 is up to the task of supporting new and current users much better than what I'm doing right now. I'm hoping that FogBugz helps me simplify this a little more easily. Also, I will have to go back and modify my FuzzMeasure 1.1 pages to improve the information I'm providing right now. It's a wonder how I sleep at night with all this junk floating around in my head all the time… :P