How is trello for feature submission

[Wing Pepper]

We want to use trello as the primary feature submission tool for our company. How does this work? Any recommendations for a Jira alternative?

[Iain Dooley]

@Wing Pepper who is submitting the features? If this is internal, then you could have something like people creating a card, if this is external then you would need to have something like a public board where people add comments. If you did that, everyone would be able to see everyone else's feature submissions. Also, you would need some automation or some other process that would take those comments and add them as cards.

Otherwise you could convert emails into cards and have people submit their feature requests via email.

SO... if this is internal, just have a board where everyone can come in and add cards to request features.

That means everyone can edit/move cards etc. If you want better permission control you can have the board team viewable with comments allowed from team members, but with no self-join and only admins can invite people.

This would be pretty similar to having a public board where anyone can comment.

In both of these cases what I'd do is have one card for each feature category where people can add their feature requests as comments and a card for feature requests that do not fit into any of those categories.

Then have a Butler or Trellinator automation that creates a card for each comment OR just manually create a card for comments that are relevant.

For example a Butler command might be:

when a comment is posted to a card in list "Feature Categories", find a card titled "NEW FEATURE TEMPLATE", copy the card to the top of list "{triggercardname}", and rename the card to "{commenttext}"

The same thing in Trellinator might look like this:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/698b7d990da635ff46932178a212c93a

I wrote an article on how to set up Trellinator here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

So that solution is a way to have this work either internally or externally, where everyone with the ability to comment can't also just archive cards or move them around, so it's probably the best "native trello" solution.

You could also create an email like featurerequests@yourdomain.com and then create Trello cards from those emails. If you're happy to use email for sending/receiving and just use Trello to keep track of the requests you could use something like the Gmail or Outlook add-ons for creating cards, or you could import them using Zapier.

If you're a G-Suite user you could also set up Benko Board for that user which is another integration I created for using Trello as an email client:

https://trello.com/integrations/#/benkoboard

[Wing Pepper]

Thanks so much for this reply - very helpful. One more question - can we set up email alerts so the internal person who submitted is alerted as their request moves through the process of being completed? Like a ticket alert?

[Iain Dooley]

@Wing Pepper Depends on which method you're using above, but in general here are 3 ways you could generate an email notification out of Trello:

1) Someone needs to be watching (subscribed to) a card to be notified when that cards changes lists, however they will be notified about absolutely everything that happens to that card. People can watch cards on any board they can view, they don't have to be a member of the board.

2) You can use an automation tool (Butler on paid plans, Trellinator, Zapier etc.) to send email notifications. This would require that the reporting person's email address be set up somehow, for example in a Custom Field or something similar. Since you can't retrieve email from Trello username you'd need some way of mapping username to email address in order to automate this process

3) If using Benko Board and people submitted their requests via email you would have access to their email address and could either automate the reply by posting a reply comment from a Trellinator/Butler account set up as the owner of the mailbox, or by parsing the email out of the card title/description to send to without having to maintain a separate map of username -> email address