Hello all

We are currently using Jazz in Express Edition for our internal
development. We think about using Jazz to have our customers enter their
requests directly in Jazz. In order to enable this, we have several
requirements and visibility issues that must be provided.

First, let me explain our structure:
We have an internal development team. They develop and maintain our
product, which is an Eclipse based RCP application. This is being sold
by our consultants. They visit and train the customers, who intend to
buy or bought our product. The customers use the product.
When a customers comes accross a problem or has an idea how to improve
the product, he contacts the according consultant, who then contacts the
internal development team. If a customer is aboard for some time and is
familiar with the tool, he can get the direct contact to the development
team. This is, I think, a rather usual situation.

If establishing Jazz as Tracking System for our customers, it is
important that the customer specific stuff is treated confidentially. In
order to provide this, visibility must be resticted.

Internal developers may see everything, all work items, all sources.
They use SCM, planing, tracking and build.
The consultants may only see work items, but all of them. They just use
tracking.
The customers may only see the work items they, or some colleagues from
the same company, created. Customers use only tracking.

Additionally it might become neccessary to restrict the internal work
item access to restrict access to some work items / discussions (where
passwords for logins to servers are mentioned / saved, etc), so only
specific users / groups (Admins) have access.

The last time I investigated the permission stuff in Jazz was 0.5Ma. I
think it is not possible there to configure this scenario properly, but
I might be mistaken. So, is it possible to configure this scenario in
Jazz? If so, is the standard edition required or is Express sufficient?
We're 15 developers internally and have about 10 consultants and another
15 customers (abou that). So concerning users, Express would be ok.
Standard is four to five times the price.

An alternative, that we currently discuss, is to separate internal and
external issues by using a second tracking system for our customers. The
"external" tracking system (e.g. Atlassian Jira) would carry the
customer related stuff. Additional benefit is, that we wouldn't have to
pay 600 per customer for a Contributor licence and we're not restricted
to 250 users. But the sync would have to be done manually.

This brings the last thought: would a connector to other tracking
systems (bugzilla, Jira), be reasonable? The connector would not only do
one-shot import-export operations, but would be capable to sync items /
item sets with each other. E.g. if WI 12,14,16 are closed, then close
bugs 13,51,63. And mirror / sync administrative stuff (iterations,
versions, dates) and maybe even data (screenshots, attachements).

Kind regards,
Stefan Stern