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Launchpad Support Tracker Documentation
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One key to making a free software project thrive is building a community of dedicated users. An important aspect of this is making it easy for users to get help in learning to use and master the product.
The Launchpad Support Tracker offers tools to effectively build a support community around your product or distribution. It makes it easy for users to find help by posting support requests that can be answered by other users in the community.
Key Features
Launchpad Integration: The Support Tracker is available for all hosted products and distributions. You can also use the existing Team infrastructure to organize the support community.
Guided Filing: When a user posts a new support request, a search is done through the existing requests to try to find similar ones. This helps users get answers faster and reduces the number of similar requests in the tracker.
Multi-lingual Support: Users can post requests in their native languages. People answering requests can choose which languages they want to support. This feature makes it easy to build native-language support community. Support as many languages as your users speak!
Detailed Workflow: The status of support requests is tracked automatically based on the actions people take on a request. This makes it easy to track which requests still need an answer and which need input from the user.
Searchable Reports: Various reports are offered making it easy to find the requests you are interested in. The Open report is perfect for users looking for a request still needing an answer. The Answered report is great for users trying to find a solution to their problem. There is also a Need Attention report which shows all the support requests that need your input. All these reports are searchable.
Support Contacts: Dedicated users can register as support contacts to receive email notifications on all support requests. These people are the backbone of your user support community.
Email Integration: The support tracker is very well integrated with email. Users posting a request receive replies on their request by email. Any users can also subscribe to requests to receive notifications when new messages are added to the request. It is even possible to post replies to existing support requests by email.
Bug Links: Support requests can be linked to bug reports. This makes it easy to build a two-layer bug reporting process where more knowledgeable users can identify and file bugs from support requests.
Documentation for the Support Tracker
Here are some documents that describe how to make the most of the support tracker feature in Launchpad:
SupportTrackerTour: a quick tour which shows the main features of the support tracker
GettingSupportInLaunchpad: Learn how to use the support tracker to get help on products or distributions hosted in Launchpad.
ProvidingSupportThroughLaunchpad: Learn how to use the support tracker to help other users.
SupportRequestLifeCycle: This reference document describes in details the support requests life cycle.
SupportInYourNativeLanguage: Learn how to use the multi-lingual features of the support tracker.
