What's new in version 6.0

FogBugz 6.0 is a major new release: the fruit of two years of hard work by the Fog Creek team. No part of FogBugz escaped untouched. We literally examined every feature and improved everything. Here are some of the big improvements.

All-new features

• A built-in, full featured, best-of-breed WYSIWYG wiki lets you use FogBugz to maintain and edit all your documentation. Wiki features include:
• a full-fledged WYSIWYG rich text editor—you won't believe you're in a web browser!
• spell checking, with custom dictionaries
• automatic draft saving, so you don't lose your work if the browser crashes or your internet connection goes down
• easy image uploading, and file attachments
• complete change history of every document kept forever
• graphical diff showing what was changed and by whom, making it trivial to revert vandalism if your wiki is open to the public
• comprehensive table editor
• custom styles, fonts, and colors - a designer can create a custom style sheet and FogBugz will offer those styles, fonts, and colors to editors
• A dramatically improved search engine finds cases, discussions, and wiki documents so efficiently you can use the search box for all your navigation.
• You can now enter a list of cases right from the list page, as easily as making a list in a text editor. You just type a title for each new case and hit enter; everything else is filled in automatically based on the current filter.
• The "Starred" menu lists cases, discussions, and wiki documents that you have flagged. It also lists pages that you've visited recently so you can go back quickly.
• Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) determines realistic schedules showing you the actual probability that you will ship on any given day:
• Quickly enter estimates for all your features right on the grid page—you no longer have to go into every case to provide estimates.
• A graphical report shows the probability of reaching any milestone for any given date, so you don't just know when you'll ship, you know how likely it is.
• Automated time sheets, which feed data back into Evidence-Based Scheduling engine to produce accurate schedules based on each estimator's historical track record. If you have a tendency to underestimate or overestimate, EBS learns this and adjusts future estimates accordingly.
• Scenario analysis lets you see how the schedule would be affected if you punt low-priority features.
• A graph shows how the ship dates have changed over time, so you can tell if you're staying on track or if you're suffering from feature creep.
• Another graph shows the schedule for each team member, so you can find bottlenecks.
• Developers can see historical estimates vs. actual elapsed time, and can delete outlying data points that reflect one-off occurrences.
• Developers can enter personal holiday and vacation schedules which are incorporated into EBS calculations
• A new class of user, community users, can register for accounts and access discussion groups and the wiki, without paying for an extra license.
• Unlimited free "virtual" users that you can use for things like "Up for grabs" or for assigning cases to teams.
• A fresh new user interface with a cute Kiwi mascot.
• FogBugz On Demand: a professionally hosted version of FogBugz from Fog Creek Software, so there's nothing to install or administer.
• A new API for developers.
• A Visual Studio add-in.

Countless improvements in response to customer feedback

• Vastly better filtering, with many new options for selecting cases, including the ability to search inside a filter, filter for cases you've already seen, filter for certain date ranges, and more.
• The Next and Previous links in a case always scroll through the cases as shown in the original filter, even if the cases change. Now, if you're working through a list of cases and closing some of them, the Next link won't get confused and jump back to the first case.
• A more standard user interface (with Settings, Help, and Log Off in the top right corner, where most web apps put it these days), with reorganized and simplified menus.
• Save and close a case in one step, if you were the person who opened it in the first place.
• You can have a different primary contact for each area in a project (or not).
• In addition to site-level administrators, you can set up project administrators, client/department administrators, wiki administrators, and discussion group administrators.
• Each user can choose their own language (FogBugz currently supports German and English).
• Each user can see dates and times in their own time zone.
• When you forward an email, you can do so with or without its attachment.
• FogBugz keeps track of which cases have changed since you last saw them, which appear in blue in the list view. This feature no longer relies on your web browser's history, so it works even when you access FogBugz from different computers. Search for show:unread to see a list of cases which have changed since you last read them.
• Default priority for new cases is now 3 instead of 1.
• When you type a time, anything before 8:00 is interpreted as PM by default (of course you can always specify am or pm).
• By default, spam is hidden in search results.

Major performance improvements

• The entire user interface has been optimized to take advantage of JavaScript and AJAX making it much faster and more responsive.
• Mail arrives faster when there's a lot of it.
• "Find as you type" makes it easier and faster to choose an item from any dropdown list.
• Frequently-used blocks of HTML are cached on the server to improve server performance.