As the name it self refers to, this module’s basic purpose is to generate different kinds of reports based on the data you already have in your activeCollab. 

After buying (for the price of $69) and installing (it’s simple, just follow the instructions from readme.txt), Reports Module will be available on the system level. Only people you allow to will be able to access and create reports that you let them to create. 

Reports module can create reports based on three criteria:

1. Project 

Project reports, for all projects, or some particular project, are displayed graphically as charts that shows:

• burn downs - open items in your projects over time. The higher the trend is the more work you’ve left to do. 
• hours - allows you to track relation between estimated hours and actual time that’s been logged. Estimated hours will be visible only if you’re using the Planning Module (developed by AppsMagnet, as well) because activeCollab doesn’t support this feature. 
• work summary - displays opened and completed items based on the category they belong to. 

Besides charts, you can see some general data related to your projects, such as the preview of opened and completed items, amount of hours spent, percentage of the closed items, upcoming Milestone and Velocity. Velocity is, according to Nirav, rate of completion of your projects. 

An interesting addition are Most Active & Open and Longest open list of items. It can point you to some of the forgotten Tickets, or unfinished Checklists. 

2. People 

This criteria allows you to see individual reports for every person with an account in your activeCollab. 

Displayed as report cards, this reports will enable you to see what that person is responsible for, how active she was, where exactly is she assigned and how much working hours has she logged. 

This tool should help you manage people you’re working with and give you a close insight in productivity rate of your team. 

3. Companies 

In this section you can see full report for you Company related items in activeCollab. Here you can see how many projects you have opened, how many user you have, how many items you have opened and closed on the system level. Also, you can see some basic data for each of your projects here. 

If you wish to list this information for one of the Client companies you can easily do that by choosing the Company you wish. 

Reports module can be a very useful and handy tool, especially if you're working with clients and great number of people. Everything is accessible easily, available at one place, and simple to set up. 

Here are a couple of suggestions how to configure roles and permissions quickly. We pointed out some of the important permissions, because they can expose sensitive information to Clients if you misunderstand their meaning and misconfigure them:

• Check the Roles and Permissions article of activeCollab Administrator’s Guide. It can help you learn about predefined Roles and what part of the system each Permission controls. 
• Client Company Manager role is created for a contact person in client companies. Person with this role is able to change company details, add people to their own company and have access to invoices issued to that company. On the other hand, Client Company Member role is meant for all the other members of the client company and their permissions are restricted only to the system access and projects that you add them to. 

• Don’t give project_management, admin_access or people_management system permissions to your clients or members of other companies. These permissions will enable them to see and access pretty much everything in your activeCollab (all projects, people and data) where they will be able to add, update, and remove some information from your system.  
• Don’t set client as a Project Leader, unless you wish to give them all permissions in that particular project. 
• When adding people to projects, you can set access level to each section of the project (Checklists, Pages, Discussions, Milestones, Files, Tickets). There are four levels available for each section: no access; has access; has access and can create; has access and can create and can manage. This covers almost all situations that you might need.

• If you wish to give clients access to some sections of your project (Discussions, for example) and you don’t wish them to see all items placed here, you can mark the items you wish to remain hidden as Private. In this case only people with can_see_private_objects permission (that we recommend only to your staff) will be able to see and access these items. This is great when you want to have an internal discussion with your team, but don't want clients to be able to see it.
• We suggest you don’t give access to Time Reports to the client (use_time_reports and manage_time_reports system permission). Time reports query the time data from all of your projects, and that’s why they are designed to be used internally.

By following these simple advices, you can bring clients on board without worrying that your sensitive data will ever be exposed to them. As suggested in #1, you may find more details in Roles and Permissions section of activeCollab documentation.

Currently it allows to deploy to an ftp server using the beanstalk feature. This extension adds a new icon to the source repository list.

When you click that icon, you will see the smaller popup, where you can make all adjustments required.

Has anyone give it a spin yet? What are your first impressions on Beanstalk Integration Module? 

This is their first release, based on their own needs as a company so they are also looking for feedback from the other activeCollab users.

Sounds interesting? Head over to Planning module 1.2 announcement post to learn more about the new release.

Soon people will stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 no matter what you may feel about this at the moment, just like they did with Netscape 4 a couple of years ago. Some companies have already stopped checking their pages in IE6 (like Apple with MobileMe, or 37signals) and some are still keeping their pages compatible, but recommending users to upgrade or to chose a better browser (Google, Facebook).

All that is for a good reason - IE6 has been with us since 2001, Microsoft has released two major updates since then (IE7 and IE8); it’s insecure, unstable and a real pain to develop for (incomplete CSS support, many compatibility problems, poor JavaScript performance, etc):

Because of all of these reasons, IE6 support is going away from activeCollab as well. The only questions are “When?” and “How?”

“When?” - As soon as we get to the next version of the activeCollab’s layout and its default theme. The system grew quite a bit since it was launched back in October 2007. Two years is a long time for a young product like activeCollab, so we’ll need to improve the application layout to better support all the features that were added since v1.0, as well as all the features that will be added in the next couple of years.

This does not mean that support is going away tomorrow -  as long as activeCollab 2 is the latest stable version, full IE6 support will be present. Version 3 and later will require a modern browser. We still have 6 - 12 months until then, but that day will come and we feel that it’s best to announce our plans upfront.

“How?” - One of our most important jobs is to make sure that activeCollab make you look good and professional. Completely dropping support for IE6 would make our users look bad to their customers who are forced to use IE6. Because of that, we'll work to make system usable in Internet Explorer 6, but some of the features that require modern browser will be disabled.

To summarize - sometime during 2010 we will stop to fully support Internet Explorer 6 in activeCollab and we will limit the support to basic features only.

Illustration by John Martz.

One feature that was created as a result of such approach is Invoicing module. We shipped a public beta a couple of days ago and here’s how the story goes so far.

Invoicing module has started as one of our learning modules. When we hire a new programmer, we give him a module to develop so he can get familiar with activeCollab platform and to produce something that our customers are asking for. The original idea was just to get the model right (how module works internally), and then to build the interface on top of it later.

The initial list of the features included just a support for unlimited number of invoices that can be issued in multiple currencies. Each invoice could have an unlimited number of items and the support for specifying different tax rates. Here in Serbia, for example, we have two different VAT rates - 8% and 18% - if you sell a computer to a customer, CPU, mother board, etc. then your VAT would go at 8% rate, but for monitor and printer it's 18%.

The idea to work on a model separately and to build interface later didn't work quite well, so the interface was built together with the model.

At the same time Goran suggested that we should add the support for generating PDF-s instead of HTML invoices. Even though I was originally against the idea because it would delay the module release, he convinced me that it’s not a big deal and developed a PDF generator in just a couple of days.

Soon after that, we started to use the module internally. One of the first remarks we got was from our accountant - why the invoice has been issued in English language to a Serbian company? It was fine for billing foreign customers, but not for local companies. She insisted that future invoices to local companies should be in Serbian. That's how we added the support to select the language of each invoice, so now you can bill your clients from France or Germany and have the invoice generated in their native language, even if it isn't the default language of your activeCollab setup.

At that point, we were ready for private beta - first (and probably the last) beta that we did with isolated group of users. The users did great, but having private beta is just too much work for us. The worst thing is that, at some point, you have to start rejecting requests from honest customers who just want to help.

The feedback received from beta testers was great! Here are just a couple of things that people suggested and that eventually ended up in the module:

• Option to specify the price of the item, either as pre-tax or post-tax, and have the other value calculated automatically based on tax rate that you select.
• Create an invoice based on all time records logged to the specific ticket and to all of its sub-tasks.
• Support for predefined invoice items (the user is selling hosting together with design service, and there were couple of hosting plans that were always the same).
• Support for items that had price set to 0 or negative value. Somehow, it never crossed our mind that people actually give discounts or offer free services, and that they want them to be included in the invoice.

Goran has also added a page where you can configure invoice colors. He worked on Unicode support, polished the invoice form, improved the performance in cases when there are a lot of items on the page, and much more.

The Invoicing module is now available as public beta. Anyone with valid license and Support and Upgrade plan can download activeCollab 2.2 beta from their profile and take Invoicing and Subversion modules for a spin. Because it went through private beta, both modules are already pretty stable and we hope that we’ll have a final 2.2 shipped very soon.

Thanks everyone who helped to shape Invoicing module into what it is now. activeCollab is finally a project collaboration tool that has well integrated system for preparing and issuing invoices. Now you can use activeCollab alone to have all things covered, instead of using multiple services (at additional monthly fees!).

All suggestions, comments and questions are welcome, as always!

In previous versions, you needed 5 files to define a module:

1. info.php - Information about the module
2. routes.php - Route definitions for the module
3. handlers.php - Event handlers that this module implements
4. install.php - Code that prepares and installs the module
5. uninstall.php - Code that cleans up the database and file system after the module has been uninstalled

Instead of all these files, now we have a single file - module class. Its name is based on module name. If module name is tickets, this class would be TicketsModule (defined in TicketsModule.class.php file) and if it is status_updates, name is StatusUpdatesModule (defined in StatusUpdatesModule.class.php file).

Information and operation handled by the old files are now fully covered with this class:

1. Information about the module are stored in object properties (like name and version). Some properties are returned by special function so you can localize them (like getDescription() or getUninstallMessage()).
2. When Router loads defined routes, it will call defineRoutes() method of each module.
3. EventManager loads even handler definition in similar ways as Router, but instead of defineRoutes() method it calls defineHandlers() method.
   
4. install.php and uninstall.php are replaced with install() and uninstall() methods.

Router and EventManager now know which module they are loading so there is no need to specify module in route and handler definition any more. You can do that if you wish (to override other modules for example), but it’s optional.

Because new module definitions extend Module class, there are helper methods they inherit that make definition of new configuration options and email templates much easier. Please check addConfigOption() and addEmailTemplate() of Module class for details.

And finally, we added support for platform tests before module is installed. Before you can install a module, activeCollab calls its canBeInstalled() method. If it returns true, module can be installed, but if it returns false, system will abort the installation. Module developer can log messages to inform the user about the tests performed and/or reasons why the module can’t be installed.

Check this implementation from new Incoming Mail module:

/**
 * Returns true if this module can be installed
 *
 * @param array $log
 * @return boolean
 */
function canBeInstalled(&$log) {
  if(extension_loaded('imap')) {
    $log[] = lang('OK: IMAP extension loaded');
  } else {
    $log[] = lang('This module requires IMAP PHP extension to be installed. Read more about IMAP extension in PHP documentation: http://www.php.net/imap');
    return false;
  } // if
  
  return true;
} // canBeInstalled

It’s that easy!

The best way to learn the new system is to see it working. Because of that we recommend that you download latest activeCollab 2 beta from your profile and check out IncomingMailModule or TicketsModule implementations to see all the new features implemented and working.

One might ask: “Why do you need a separate feature for document posting when you have the Files tab in projects?” The answer is simple - itʼs a place where you can publish documents that will be available to everyone, not just people who are working on a particular project.

Like Files, this section displays icons next to the document name to describe it. If you uploaded an image, system will display small image preview instead of type icon. Documents can be grouped by category and you can "pin" important documents to the top of the list. Visibility, email notifications and category management are working the same way as they do in Files.

Unlike Files, Documents are available on a higher level, outside any of the projects. Everyone with the right kind of permission can access them.

Documents can be uploaded from your computer or created on the spot as simple text documents. Uploaded documents are available for download only, while text documents can be opened and read directly there, in Docs section.

Whether user can or can't see a document depends directly on the Role that person has. If user is allowed to see private objects, she will see all of the documents, but if she donʼt have that permission, she will have access only to documents that are marked as Normal. This is handy if you wish to hide some documents from specif groups of people.

Documents feature is designed to be simple and easy to use, and we hope youʼll like it and find it useful.

Lets imagine a team of people working on a website. They can use Pages to write and organize all the content for that project. Changes they and client make to the articles are recorded for future reference and each time someone updates an article, everyone involved is notified via email. Cool, ha?

Although the purpose of this module has not changed, a lot of new functionality was introduced based on feedback we got from activeCollab users.

First important change is that we dropped concept of start page. It just didn’t work. Instead, when you click on Pages tab, you’ll get a list of recently updated pages grouped by date when they were last updated:

This page gives you a quick overview over what the team is working on at the moment.

In activeCollab v2 we also added categories to pages. Like in previous version, pages can be organized in a tree like structure under categories. This gives you flexibility to organize even the complex projects such as books, software documentation etc:

System offers a really simple tool that lets you quickly reorganize pages by dragging them to a desired position in the document structure:

Whey you are done with a page, and you want to “announce” that to the rest of the team, just mark it as archived. The page will be crossed over on the list, so there will be no confusion whether the work is done or not.

Although old activeCollab remembered all page content changes, people reported that it was really hard to find what were the differences between versions. This is why we added a nice little compare tool that highlights changes between  versions:

On top of new features we just described, old features such as page tasks, unlimited number of attachments and comments, email notifications etc, are still here.

We hope you’ll enjoy improvements we made. Thank you for your continuous support!