Are there any tools for privately showing a customer progress on their work, and having discussions with the developers?

Question

My boss tasked me with finding a sort of system for a customer to be able to log into a website and view their website as a work in progress (so employees would obviously have to be able to upload their work). All communication would be handled through this website.

It sounds like a forum, but customers would not be able to see each others' projects. It's private and the only people who could see all customer projects are employees.

I'm sure I could implement it using a forum and some visibility options, but I was just wondering if anyone knew of any systems similar to this.

Answer 1

Something like Basecamp would work - set up a Basecamp project for each customer/project and only give customers access to the appropriate projects, while your employees could have access to all.

Answer 2

Sharepoint is always on option if you are on the Windows platform. Also might want to look into Mingle. I haven't used it in a couple version, but it showed real promise.

Answer 3

Most of the people I see that sub out a website don't get to view the actual website themselves live on the Internet - because just simply its to easy to copy down the underlying HTML (unless of course much of it is server side scripts, but that's another store). Most of the time they just get screen shots (and perhaps user testing on the developers machine) until most of the money has changed hands.

Why not put up a bulletin board (like phpBB, but not necessarily phpBB) and segregate what each client can see. Then you can post screen shots in each customer's area and let them comment and discuss?

Answer 4

We have a Forum-style section at the bottom of the page (on our DEV sites) where people can add a Comment. The ideas is that a Tester, finding an issue, will check the Comments at the bottom of the page before adding a new (possibly duplicate) Comment.

We allow Assignment of the issues, internally, and then Assigning it back to the Author for Approval, once it is fixed.

Additionally testers mark the page as "Operational" or "Broken". We have a report of pages not-yet--reviewed - so testers can make sure they have achieved 100% coverage.

We have routines that will reset all pages to "Test required" (ready for another round of testing), optionally leaving pages marked as "Broken" at that status, or resetting everything to "Testing required".

We tend to use sub domains for this - so TEST.MyDomain.COM - and have the ROBOTS.TXT set to disallow all search engine spidering - so only those in the-know will find the site. (I suppose you could be more paranoid, and require password-access, but our clients are about to launch the site and not paranoid about outsiders seeing it - indeed, they often ask Customers etc. to have-a-look)

Having said that we do have a "Known user login" which proffers no specific admin powers, but does log any Comments to that specific user - always useful if we can't work out what the heck their Comment actually meant!