Using Custom Fields in your projects

When managing and tracking your issues and tasks, it’s important that you get the information you need from those reporting or updating your issues.

MantisHub has native fields that exist ‘out-of-the-box’ that will capture generic information relevant to any issue, no matter your business. These are things like the reporter of the issue, the time of reporting, priority, status, last update and more.

We also have common project management and software development fields that you can tap into, with our support for due date, time tracking, and versions.

However, there will always be specific information needed that might only be relevant to your industry or business. You might even have data specific to certain projects that you are running. If that’s the case, you should take a look at MantisHub Custom Fields. It allows you to create a new field with a specific data type and settings, and link it to the projects where you want to gather the data.

Configuring Custom fields

This functionality is on by default and is configurable via your Manage page. Head to the Custom Fields tab, enter in the name of your new field, click the “New Custom Field” button and you’re on your way.

There are a number of aspects of the custom field you need to define including, type, default value, possible values, access to read or edit this field and the length of the field.

Custom field types

Most of the ‘Type’ options for custom fields are self-explanatory (string, numeric, text area etc). However, we’ve had some common questions from our customers which we’ve turned into these tips below:

  1. Float is essentially a decimal number.
  2. Enumeration is a list of values and is displayed as a dropdown list. You can only select one option and a check mark is displayed next to the selection.
  3. List shows you all the value options in one box.
  4. Multiselect is a list that allows selection of more than one option by holding the Shift/Cmd/Ctrl key.
  5. Checkbox and Radio both display all options with a box or circle to denote the selection. Checkbox will allow more than one value to be checked whereas Radio only allows one value.

Other custom field settings

You also have a number of settings in the custom field configuration where you can nominate if this field should be:

  • displayed when reporting, editing, resolving or closing an issue
    • mandatory when reporting, editing, resolving or closing an issue
      • available as a filter option on the View Issues page.

Cool Feature: You can reference your versions and categories fields as possible values of a custom field! When defining your custom field, set the type to be ‘List’ and within the ‘Possible Values’ setting you can define the following options:

  • ‘=users’ will list users with access to the project + empty/none option
  • ‘=handlers’ will list users with access to be assigned issues in the project + empty/none option
  • ‘=versions‘ will lists all non-obsolete versions
  • ‘=released_versions‘ will list all released versions
  • ‘=future_versions‘ will list all non-released, non-obsolete versions
  • ‘=categories‘ will use your list of categories

But keep an eye on this space… cause we hope to release more options for referencing other fields as possible values in the future! Check out our support article for help on creating custom fields.

Linking the field to the project

Once the custom field is created, you need to link it to the projects in which you wish to use it. Go into your newly created custom field and scroll to the bottom where you will see the “Link custom field to projects” section. Select the project (or multiple projects by holding down the shift + ctrl/cmd key). Optionally you can specify a Sequence which determines the order in which it appears in the issue details. Then Click “Link Custom Field”.

Happy data gathering! As always you can reach out to the MantisHub experts on the support team if you need help with any aspect of setting up or linking custom fields.

MantisHub – The power of a unified issue tracking and customer helpdesk system

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With a goal of making your life easier and sparing you and your team from learning yet another system, MantisHub has a variety of in-built systems & plugins to complement any issue tracking solution.

By far the most popular of these is our Helpdesk plugin which is a FULL customer support ticketing system.

Often, companies purchase an entirely new, separate system to receive and respond to customer queries but with MantisHub, you can have customer emails funneled straight into your system to automatically create a new ticket in your project of choice. So your customer support can be fully integrated with your issue tracking and project management!

And the best part… its included with your plan*. Yep, I’ll give you a sec to just go back and read that again. Not only is MantisHub already, extremely well priced in the issue management market but it comes with “batteries included”, a complete Helpdesk solution. Other help desk system vendors will charge upwards of $25 PER AGENT and some double this. With MantisHub an issue tracking AND a help desk solution costs you only $4 per agent*.

MantisHub Helpdesk is really quick and easy to setup. In just a few minutes you are ready to receive tickets. The interface is simple and easy to use so your support staff need little training. Check out our support article including a helpful walk-through video, on how to set it up and use it. Also well worth a look is our Snippets plugin that goes hand-in-hand with Helpdesk to provide insertion of frequently used support responses. You can even start testing it all out with MantisHub’s free trial. Sign-up is also quick and easy with no obligation or credit card required!

You can, and our customers often do, use MantisHub as a help desk solution just on its own but coupled with an internal task tracking tool, it’s even more powerful. Here are 5 ways to increase productivity and efficiency by using your support ticketing and issue/task tracker together:

1. Collaboration between Development and Support

Having a single system accessible by your developers and your customer success/support team will have your team easily working together on customer tickets as well as the underlying backlog items. Information sharing can go both ways with your customer support team collecting bug & feature request details to pass along to developers. Developers meanwhile can provide information on fixes and work arounds for the support team to pass onto the customers. Re-assign support tickets directly to the relevant developer or @mention them to get questions answered. All internal communications can all be done within the customer ticket using private notes. So troubleshooting, internal processes, brainstorming etc can be added to the ticket, yet customers don’t see any of the background conversations.

2. Linking support tickets to backlog items

A handy practice is to create a link between the reported issues or feature requests that come in from customers, and the internal issue created to track progress of the bug or task. Using the Relationships feature in MantisHub, you can easily find and reference customer tickets for added information such as fault details or replication steps. This also makes it easier to take customer facing action once the fix or feature is implemented such as advanced deployment for affected customers or notifying them of upcoming fixes, features or deployments.

Relating internal issues and customer support tickets

3. Prioritize work & allocate team resources correctly

Creating relationships with customer reported issues or requests for a specific task, can help with prioritizing tasks within the development team. You can determine how often a backlog item comes up in support by checking the number of related support tickets. Then push those items with the most Helpdesk tickets linked, up the line as a high priority fix.

4. Easy creation of backlog items

Create backlog items by simply cloning the ticket out of help desk support project to the relevant implementation project . This way all the details needed are already added to the backlog issue and wont get lost in translation. Handy whether you want to add: 1. a bug fix for the development team, 2 a feature request for the product management team or 3 a task to amend or improve documentation for the customer success team.

5. Use Tags to analysis support tickets and improve efficiencies in your Support team.

There are 2 ways Tags can help refine your support processes and improve efficiencies.

  • Creating comprehensive knowledge base resources: Having collaborated and consulted on customer issues within your support tickets, these tickets can end up being a wealth of information. You can Tag and/or extract these data filled tickets for further action. You can copy or clone these tickets into a central repository project. This data can then be used for training support staff, creation of internal job aides or support snippets or development of new support procedures.
  • Analysis for high frequency issues: Tag each support issue depending on the area or team responsible. This allows review of what areas or services get the most highest frequency of support requests. You can then look into processes or procedures to alleviate these support loads or bottlenecks and improve customer experience. Create and allocate the tasks for these steps directly from within MantisHub.

Hope we’ve given you some food for thought. With this integrated system in MantisHub there is no need to purchase, maintain or train staff on a second system. That could save you time and significant dollars $$ every month.

I’m sure you can think of many other ways a combined tool for customer support ticketing and internal issue tracking helps with your business workflow. Feel free to share them in the comments section so others can benefit.

And as always, reach out to our team if you need any help signing up for our free trial, setting up your Helpdesk plugin or utilizing the power of MantisHub!

*Helpdesk plugin unavailable for starter plans. Based on Platinum plan for 30 users at $59.95 pm as of 02.2022. Pricing is subject to change and current pricing can be found on our website https://mantishub.com/pricing

Tracking Time in MantisHub

Whatever your business may be, keeping a record of the time that members of your team spend on your project tasks or issues can help in many areas, providing data to help with developing efficient, cohesive workflows for your business tasks. It’s also necessary where businesses have specific business needs to track time spent against tasks within your organization. There can be several reasons you need your team to record any time spent on their tasks.

  • Where clients are charged based on tracked hours spent on client services.
  • Managers and supervisors are required to regularly report on the efficiency of teams and measure performance.
  • Planners need to predict resource needs for future projects by identifying bottlenecks or high demand areas.

So among our many handy features and integrations, MantisHub have a few options to address your task time-tracking needs.

In-built MantisHub time tracker

Setup is easy: The easiest way to start tracking time is to turn on the in-built time tracking feature within MantisHub. Turning it on just requires a simple line of configuration and straight away you’ll be able to enter time details in your issues and run reports on time spent on issues. Full setup instructions can be found in our Setting up Time Tracking support article.

Enter time manually or automatically: Once enabled, your team can record time spent on the issue as part of issue updates. You can either enter these details manually, or enable the stop watch feature. With the stop watch feature you can just click the start button when you begin working on a task and stop when you’re done, to record time spent automatically.

Report on time spent: When you turn on time tracking, you’ll notice a new menu item on the left hand main menu where managers can run reports on tracked time within a project for any specified period. Project management and resource planning is easier with the ability to view just how much time your team is spending within each area. It’s also great for client chargeback as you also have the option to turn on time tracking billing. This feature allows you to specify a hourly cost for time spent and total cost per task will be calculated and displayed in your report!

For more information on using MantisHub’s in-built time tracking feature, check out this article or sign up for a free MantisHub trial to test it out.

Time Tracking Integrations

If you already use a dedicated time tracking service in your organization and want to tap into existing functionality, MantisHub offers integrations with several third-party time tracking services. Using browser (e.g. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) extensions, you can connect MantisHub to:

Toggl – Install the Toggl extension here.

Clockify – Install the Clockify extension here.

TimeCamp – Install the TimeCamp extension here.

Once installed, you’ll see a timer button when you head into your MantisHub issues. Just click, and time starts recording in your third party application. These integrations also import MantisHub project and issue information. So you can automatically populate fields such as task name, description and project!

So there are a few options for you to go ahead and try out! If you do have any other application that you prefer to use for time tracking, you can always reach out to your provider to request an integration with MantisHub or reach out to our team. We’re happy to work with them to provide a solution for you.

Agile workflow management with Kanban for MantisHub

Announcing MantisHub’s new Kanban plugin! Just released and exclusive to MantisHub, the Kanban plugin is a highly requested feature bringing another Agile feature to the MantisHub toolset.

Kanban may have been born in the auto industry but in the 21st century, it’s spread into many industries for project management and has most ardently been adopted in software development as a significant tool within Agile development frameworks.

The reason that Kanban has become so popular is many faceted but mainly, it has proven valuable in making teams more efficient with faster delivery of updates. So what is Kanban? Well, the principle of Kanban is for teams to place tasks on a visual ‘board’, grouped into columns reflecting workflow statuses. A very basic board will have at the least ‘To Do’, ‘In progress’ and ‘Closed’ though most software development workflows have more complex steps. You can then progress these tasks through workflow statuses to completion.

It works with principles of a continuous flow of work within a ‘work in progress’ (WIP) limit. So your board would display all work currently in progress including resource allocations, and new tasks are added as capacity becomes available.

MantisHub supports a Kanban plugin that allows you to create and interact with Kanban boards within your projects. It supports a ‘Standard View’ that displays issues in columns that correspond to your defined MantisHub status values, and a ‘Swim Lane View’ which will introduce rows according showing the assigned user or resource.  Kanban boards created in MantisHub are linked to a tag, and issues with the relevant tag attached would be visible on the given board as a ‘card’. You can then interact with the cards (drag/drop) to make changes to your issues.

This feature is ideal for running your regular software development sprints. You could have a board created per sprint and ‘tag’ nominated issues to place on your Kanban board, move these issues through you workflow statuses to resolution and then remove issues after they are closed. Outstanding issues can be re-tagged for the next sprint.

The Kanban board format provides transparency for your team for all on-going work and allows you to visualize the progress of each task through the workflow to resolution and closure. The team can feel a sense of achievement in meeting goals where work delivery is continuous and not always linked to a product ‘release’. It also allows you to ensure even distribution of work across your resources and identify any bottlenecks. The methodology is highly popular in project management and software development and has proven effective in eliminating bottlenecks, reducing cycle time and facilitating faster feedback and delivery of changes.

Don’t forget MantisHub has a free trial so you can sign up, obligation free and test it out! Have a read of our Kanban plugin support documentation and learn how to add, move and remove issues from your Kanban boards. And check out all our other features like email notifications, workflow customizations, group actions and third party integrations that will add value to your Kanban functionality but automating team communications, workflow process and efficiency.

Growing with you – MantisHub plans for all teams great and small.

With plans to fit all shapes and sizes, MantisHub can cater for your small, growing or large teams. Our fully hosted issue and bug tracking solution can meet your needs, whether you are just starting out or you need a large corporate-wide solution to support 1000 or more users. We can also offer enterprise-level on-premise solutions if you have policies requiring you to maintain an in-house MantisBT setup.

MantisHub hosted plans

MantisHub is primarily a hosted cloud-based solution provider based on open-source MantisBT with the added value of:

  • Access from anywhere: built on AWS infrastructure, you can be sure of speedy, reliable service wherever you are in the world and the security of your data.
  • No maintenance overhead: all server, software and feature updates are performed by our team as soon as they become available. And we do daily backups of your data.
  • Expert email support: our team of MantisBT experts are on hand to help with any issues or offer advice on best practises in setting up your system.
  • Customizations: are available to tailor your workflows to suit your specific processes.
  • MantisHub exclusive features and plugins: such as Helpdesk for integrated customer support ticketing, chat integrations, SSO with ID providers such as Google & Microsoft and much more!

With a lower overall cost of ownership, this is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck with less work for you. Check out our pricing page to see which plan suits you in terms of user numbers and desired features. We suggest you start with the Platinum plan which includes 30 users accounts, 10GB of data storage and includes most MantisHub features.

Platinum Plus – Volume discounted plans

Once you have exceeded 100 users in your MantisHub, it’s worth checking out our Volume discounted plans. Here we drop the price per user significantly with added discounts for annual plans plus larger storage allocations. If you head to our pricing page calculator, just plug-in your user numbers and we’ll suggest the best value plan for you. Or see the table below for full Platinum Plus options:

PlanUsersStorageMonthly PriceAnnual Price
Platinum 200up to 20020GB$275*$2,750*
Platinum 300up to 30030GB$300*$3,300*
Platinum 500up to 500250GB$350*$3,850*
Platinum 1000up to 1000100GB$500*$5,500*
pricing current Jul 2020. Subject to change.

Migrating your in-house MantisBT

MantisBT is free open source software that you would have installed, set up and maintained on your own servers and infrastructure. You will have had to rely on internal expertise or MantisBT online forums for any help or support.

If you currently run MantisBT in-house you can alleviate your maintenance load, tap into expert support, widen service availability and keep all your existing data and users. Purchase our migration program for quick, seamless relocation of your database to MantisHub to enjoy all the benefits listed above straight away. We highly recommend this path and our migrated customers, without exception, love the result! We also now offer hosting within the EU for those who need to retain their data within Europe to satisfy GDPR policies.

On-premise Enterprise plan

Some of our customers are required to keep data out of the cloud and maintain an in-house database due to corporate or industry policies. We now include in our offering, remote support services for these customers. Some items that can be included in your custom enterprise-level support solution are:

  • Software updates to bring your MantisBT to the latest release.
  • Migration of your MantisBT database to a new server.
  • Supported workflow customizations.
  • MantisHub hosted service for staging and testing.
  • Email support with access to our experienced team and to all our support documentation and video tutorials.
  • Setup of regular backups.

Drop an email to our team or book a consult to chat about your requirements.

Getting on the right plan

If you are new to MantisHub, you have plenty of time to test out all the functionality and features of MantisHub bug and issue tracking with our 14-day trial. Your setup in a minute or two with no obligations and no credit card needed. And when you’re ready, just add payment details and select the plan that fits your team size and feature needs.

Need a migration? It is so easy to move your legacy, in-house MantisBT across to MantisHub. Sign up for a trial and then email support to schedule a suitable weekend for your migration. Deliver your data on Friday afternoon and we get you up and running smoothly by Monday morning!

If you already have a MantisHub subscription, you can change your plan at any time via your billing portal. If you are near passing the 100 user mark, make sure to check out our Platinum Plus bulk user plans to take advantage of discounted user pricing for as little as 45c per user per month. If you have any issues at all, you can just reach out to our support team and they can help advise you on the right plan for you or help move you across.

Looking forward to having you onboard with us!

Scheduled issue creation with Recurring Tasks

Recurring tasks

MantisHub has just launched a super useful plugin exclusive for MantisHub customers to help you handle those regular ongoing tasks that every team has on their plate.

There is only so much information you can fit into a calendar reminder so having the added functionality of automatic creation of an issue that you can track through to completion, which includes any repetitive data and details, inherits default field values (e.g. priority or due dates), automatically assigned to the right person as well as triggering email notifications (or integrated with your chat application) to keep everyone in the loop is a huge bonus!

Available for Platinum and above plans, our Recurring tasks plugin allows you to set a schedule for automatic creation of issues with your desired settings.

Tasks can be set daily, weekly, monthly or annually and you can set a default description and assignment as well as restrict the number of times the task is created.

The use cases are endless. You can use it to automatically create issues and track tasks. such as:

  • annual service subscription renewals or performance appraisals
  • monthly reporting, invoicing, or payroll
  • weekly check on cloud consumption costs to avoid surprises.
  • daily dashboard and log checks

You know your system best and how recurring tasks can help in your workflow and business processes to improve efficiency. And to make sure those repetitive tasks (not always particularly popular) don’t get swept under the carpet.

Super flexible too. Once created, you can amend, re-assign, limit, disable or re-enable tasks as needed. Check out our support article for more details on how to turn it on and how it all works. 

Hope we’ve helped solve some of your work problems with the Recurring tasks plugin! If so, we’d love to hear from you! Tweet @mantishub and let us know what kind of automation you’ve set up with Recurring tasks. Or reach out to us at any time with your feedback.

 

Boost your team’s work from home productivity with MantisHub

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If you are like a good chunk of the world at the moment, you’re being responsible and staying home as much as possible to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. That means, of course, that many companies have mandated a work from home policy. Continue reading “Boost your team’s work from home productivity with MantisHub”

MantisHub – Improvements to Attachments

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The team at MantisHub are wishing you all stay safe in this troubled COVID-19 riddled time. And like you, we’re carrying on as best we can. There are still issues to resolve and bugs to fix and we’re here to help.

The MantisHub team have not been idle and the latest release includes some noteworthy changes, in particular in the area of attachments. Here are two additions, that we’re pretty sure you’ll be excited about. Continue reading “MantisHub – Improvements to Attachments”

Integrate MantisHub with Microsoft Teams for easy team comms.

MSteams Integration

Announcing MantisHub’s latest chat integration to help keep your whole team up to date. With our Microsoft Teams plugin, you can connect your Team channels to your MantisHub projects to get live updates on all your issue creations, closures and updates. Continue reading “Integrate MantisHub with Microsoft Teams for easy team comms.”