Missing Features

FogBugz — an outstanding bug tracking tool — has a really neat feature called remind. Essentially, a user can select one or more open cases and have the system send a reminder email to a user.

FogBugz includes links to the tickets you select and formats a draft email body accordingly. Most times you can select a dozen cases and fire off a remind email in under four seconds with just two clicks. Very cool.

This is a great feature for any project manager, as part of the job is frequently kicking the developer about due dates. Your correspondent frequently uses this tool when reviewing a list of past due tickets among his development team.

Here is the remind compose screen:

However, this handy tool does have a really simple, but needed, missing feature: a CC field.

Perhaps the CC feature was overlooked because most people don’t really know what the purpose of a CC field does in an email. Can’t you just use the TO field?

Well, no, not really.

A CC on an email is one of two things:

1. A way to keep a team member informed; or,
2. A handy way to add weight to an email.

While a BCC is a soft notification (in that you let the boss know something but not the recipient that the boss knows the something), a CC is a hard notification in that it adds authoritative weight to any email sent. A BCC is used to let a valued employee save face while still keeping the boss in the loop. A CC is used to reinforce the email with the superior authority of the person CC’ed.

When used correctly, a CC can say Hey! This is important. As you can see, I’m letting the boss know I told you this.

Since the remind feature in FogBugz is really just a quick way to send a you dropped the ball email, including a CC feature can only add to the effectiveness of any emails sent with it.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS