project management

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Did anyone here have any sugestions about a project management software for web. I want something that I can add one project, add tasks to this project and can add all kind of stuff like links, files, discussion groups. The tasks are assigned to people that can change his task. And everyone cann see the big picture. Ops a good feature request form and an trouble ticket integrated is good too.

Any ideas?

Camilo

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000

Answers

Camilo, check out "intranets.com". I think it will take care of most of your needs...

cheers

Peter

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000


Web-Based Project Management

Try Pyra. It's a free web-based project management service, currently in beta.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000

Pyra's very cool, but buggy, and no longer supported as its creators are focused on Blogger.

Many web-based collaborative spaces out there include task lists, but they're non-hierarchical, which to me makes them useless.

WebProject (http://www.wproj.com/) does provide a hierarchy. Not free.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000


eproject.com

I've tried www.eproject.com with an external client on a small scale, with reasonable success. Getting used to a "project portal" where stuff gets posted is new to some people, so consider a bit of change management plan if you are going to use one.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2000

The best option until now ( I didn't see the price ) is the eproject.com. I'm asking the guys at this company to send me some comercial info.

Camilo

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2000



Open Text

There is another, albeit more expensive (I think) option for project portals that you might consider from Open Text Corporation called Livelink. One advantage over eproject.com, for example, is that you can check-in and check-out documents as you might source code.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 2000

www.groovenetworks.com - pretty decent shit for a Beta

-- Anonymous, November 22, 2000

I don't know if there's any product available yet but it looks like the guy over at http://dotnetdan.blogspot.com is doing exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

You may also wish to check out the open source BITS (Bug and Issue Tracking System), developed by Ben Adidas at OpenForce. See http://openforce.net/library/doc/bits/manual.adp. It's based on AOLserver, PostgreSQL and the OpenACS (ArsDigita Community System). Here's the description from their web site:

OpenForce BITS (Bug and Issue Tracking System) is a web-based system
to manage the entire life-cycle of bugs and issues in
a technical project. It is meant to be very simple and fast to use so
that the overhead of involving BITS is negligible compared
with the added organizational power it provides. 

BITS Overview

BITS defines project teams and users. A project corresponds to one development effort, or one client engagement. A team of users is associated with each project. Each team corresponds to one and only one project.

Users have project-specific roles. BITS defines three roles:

External: a user who can enter issues, browse existing issues, and add comments to existing issues within her projects. This is usually the role of a QA person. Internal: a user who can do everything an external use can do, plus edit issue properties, assign and be assigned issues, mark issues as fixed. This is usually the role of a developer. Administrator: a user who has all permissions that an internal user has, but can also mark issues as closed (once they're fixed), and edit the membership and roles of the team. This is the usually the role of a project lead.

A user may be external for Project A, but administrator for Project B. Also, users will only be aware of projects that they are members of. Other projects will simply appear to not exist to them.

Sections of BITS

BITS is composed of three tools:

Team Management: creation and maintenance of project teams. Assigning of roles. Ticket Tracker: managing of issues, assigning of issues to members, tracking issue history and issue progression. ToDo Manager: a system to manage task lists. This is meant to present a full, personalized dashboard of tasks that a particular user has to accomplish. Each user can maintain their own, individual, private tasks, mixed in with the collaborative task lists. All issues to fix will also appear as specialized tasks.

Team Management

Any user can create a new team by visiting the Team Manager. The steps are as follow:

Visit the Team Manager page Click on "new team" Enter the email addresses, one per line, of the internal members, and external members. Don't add a newline at the end of the last email address. (The user performing the process will automatically be added as an administrator of this new project team.) Don't worry, you'll be able to add more admins/internals/externals later! Click on submit, and verify all the email addresses carefully. If these users exist already in the Community System, they will be simply added to the team. If they do not yet exist, they will be added as "converted" users, meaning users who are presented by not yet fully registered. The registration process will take place the first time they log on. If you have typed in everything correctly, toggle the email indicator depending on whether or not you want all users to receive emails that they have been added to the group. Then click submit. The team will be created, as will the project. Each member of the team will have a task list created for that project's purpose in his todo-manager, and that task list will be shared with the whole team. Everything is ready to start reporting issues!

Ticket Tracker

The ticket tracker manages project-wide issues. Issues are entered in a relatively straight-forward way. Issues can have different statuses:

Open: the issue is new and still in progress Fixed: the issue has been fixed Closed: the issue has been verified fixed and is now closed Needs Clarification: the assigned team member needs more details

Any modification to an issue, status, due date, severity is logged. The change log is viewable by selecting "issue history" from the single issue page.

Issues can be assigned to one or more individuals. The Ticket Tracker dashboard (the first page a user sees when entering the ticket tracker) will, by default, display all the open issues assigned to the user, ordered by severity.

ToDo Manager

The idea of the todo manager is to organize tasks into task lists. Task lists can be shared with other users.

The ToDo manager is actually an interface to other modules of the system. Thus, the ToDo manager will present each user with an automatically-generated todo list of the issues/bugs she has to address as defined in the Ticket Tracker. The ToDo manager is thus the perfect login dashboard for users of a system, from which they can then jump through to the appropriate issue in the Ticket Tracker.

A task has three possible states:

Open: the task is open for completion Closed: the task has been checked off, and appears in strike-through style. It will remain visible to the user for a period of time defined in the ToDo Preferences, available from every page of the ToDo module in the upper right-hand corner. Deleted: the task has been marked deleted. This can only be done once a task has been marked closed (just to prevent from inadvertently deleting a task). Tasks remain in the "deleted" state for a couple of days, at which point they are automatically purged from the system. When deleted, they do not appear in the user's normal views, but can still be retrieved by selecting "deleted tasks" from the upper right-hand corner of every page. This link appears only when there exists at least one deleted task.

When a team and project are created, a task list is automatically created for each member of the team. This task list is shared with the rest of the team, and is simply meant for the assignment of small tasks between members of the team.

At the same time, an automatically-generated task list will show up for every team member that indicates what issues they should work on.

Summary

In short, you will use:

The team manager to define your project teams The Ticket Tracker to enter and manage the project issues, defects, and enhancement requests. The ToDo Manager to assign various small tasks to users that do not warrant a trackable "issue" (e.g. "look into testing tools"). The ToDo manager will also be used to centralize all tasks that a specific user should worry about.



-- Anonymous, November 29, 2000

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