Currently there is only the ability of the Administrator to change the ‘state’ of a message.

By ‘state’ I mean a specific use of the Category attribute on Messages. There are already applications which use the concept of categories as a form of ‘state’ like BCTix – however this approach within BaseCamp alone can only be done to a message by Administrators – which in turn screws up date stamp on the message because it also updates the creation date timestamp.

My thought would be that you could create Category ‘groups’ which contain a list of category names set up in a specific order.

EXAMPLE:

Category-Group “Support Ticket” contains the following categories:
1. “Support Ticket: New Ticket”
2. “Support Ticket: Reviewed Ticket”
3. “Support Ticket: Actioned Ticket”
4. “Support Ticket: Closed Ticket”

The idea is that by having a single button on the user interface, a message posted to ‘support ticket’ could have its state set to “Support Ticket: New Ticket” by default and then a single click on the message from a non-administrator could change the state to the next one in the list until the last step. Note that changing state should not affect the Message creation date, rather it should have a list of dates when it moved from each state to the next.

Administrators may be able to manually set the ‘state’ just like now they can change the category.

This simple approach to custom workflows allows for a huge number of cases where a project management tool crosses the line in to simple process management. There would be use in customer support within a project, internal workflows, generic business processes.

+1 for this.

I toyed with the idea of allowing BCTix users to store an Admin login that would allow their other users to change the “state” (message category) by proxy. Problem is, no one but me really would be willing to store an Admin login in there I don’t think :-)

BCTix is however undergoing a ground-up re-write to address a number of issues and add some cool features and I am considering changing it to use bracketed meta-tags to manage state, ie. “[1104:Open] Fix Printer”.

My company’s current category archetype is:

Change Order: Active
Change Order: Complete
Change Order: Pending
Issue: Active
Issue: Complete
Issue: Pending
Miscellaneous
Reference
Review: Complete
Review: Pending

...and it would be really nice if say the person who solved the issue but wasn’t an Admin or the message creator could change the category.

(to the few of you that actually use BCTix, yes, the inclusion of non-”ticket” related categories here indicates that the new version of BCTix is moving away from requiring a dedicated project for the “Helpdesk”)