First, I apologize in advance for the length of this and the number of questions....

I'm evaluating aC (Corporate version) for use by my company. I've been playing with the trial, but with the inability to add more sample projects, the inability to see how administration (especially user management) works across projects, and the terseness of the docs, I'm finding it difficult to develop a complete understanding of how the software works. Thus, I'm hoping you fine folks in here can help me out.

Here, briefly, is our situation. We have a handful of developers scattered around the world. All of them are managed at a high level by our CTO. What we want is for him to be able to assign entire projects to one or more developers, and then easily follow the overall progress of those projects. The developers themselves need to be able to do most of their own PM, but in such as way that there's transparency so that the CTO may follow along. Additionally, some developers will be getting small teams underneath them, and those lead developers should be able to perform CTO-like management over their own teams. That's the gist of our situation; here are some specific questions and requirements in no particular order:

1) Projects need to have tasks, and tasks need to have sub-tasks. All tasks need to have the option of being tracked through a series of phases (like "Coding" or "Awaiting Change Management").

2) Each task needs to have the ability to have associated notes and comments stored with it.

3) It doesn't appear to be possible to specify milestones without dates. Doing so would be helpful for us in many cases because a lot of our smaller projects are done on an as-time-permits basis. In these cases, there are no deadlines, and no way to make even slightly educated guesses about deadlines, and yet, it'd be nice to still follow these projects through a series of milestones. Is stripping this requirement in the code a large modification (i.e., it would require changes in several places and affect database integrity)? Or is this a change already planned for a future version?

4) When dates are used on milestones, and you change one of them, it'd be nice to have the option of having aC automatically push the subsequent ones back by the same amount of time.

5) I'd like to be able to attach files and comments to any object, but this doesn't seem to be possible.

6) It'd be nice to be able to easily reference other objects in comments, and have aC automatically make the references into links. A similar feature can be found in Bugzilla, where, for example, you can refer to "bug 6 comment 2" in a comment, and Bugzilla will automatically make the phrase a link to the referenced bug and comment. This would be a nice future addition.

7) For the CTO and team leader roles, we need easy ways to see the overall status of all projects (% complete, ETA if available, etc.), the tasks that everyone is working on, and the status of those tasks (% done or phase ["Coding", etc.]). How are these goals best accomplished in aC?

8)How does one create subtasks on tasks? I'd like to reflect inter-task dependencies.

9) We'd like to have some basic integration between our PM system and our corporate wiki. In particular, when we create a project, we want a project page created in the wiki, with the link readily available wherever it makes sense in the system. Additionally, we want to optionally create a new wiki page for each task, and put a link to it on the parent project's wiki page. And again, we want the tasks' wiki links visible in the PM system where it makes sense.

10) What's the best way to support a sign-off process? When a developer completes a task, we want them to mark it as waiting for a sign-off, then have the team leader do a code review or whatever other checks are necessary before doing the actual deployment.

11) Elsewhere in the company, we're using Gemini, another PM system. We have some hooks for our SVN system that catch Gemini task references in commit comments (e.g., "gem:367" to refer to task number 367), then create comments on the Gemini task that includes the commit message as well as a list of the files effected by the commit. Is there anything out there that would provide a similar integration between aC and SVN?

12) Is there a way to get data out of aC, like an XML export method?

13) I've noticed that the formatting toolbar for text fields doesn't support Safari or its many derived browsers (like OmniWeb). Any chance this'll be fixed in the future? We're an enlightened company that doesn't just use Windows and Win IE :-). (FWIW, I found that if I change my browser's user agent string to that of Firefox, the bar appears and mostly works just fine.)

14) The web site talks about an API for plugins, but the docs don't seem to have any mention of it. Where are the API docs? Or are they only available after purchase?

I recognize that some of these things (and other things that we'd like) aren't in aC and won't ever be. We're very open to customizing it to add those things. What I'm wondering about is, what's the code like? Is it heavily OO, heavily procedural, or somewhere in the middle? How well commented is it? How about things like variable naming consistency? Is the HTML separate from the PHP? Customizing always presents difficulties when it comes to application upgrades, but code cleanliness and structure can make the problem better or worse; for those who've gone down this road, what's your experience been like?

First, thanks for all the information! Just a couple of clarifications....



This an important one for us. How much effort do you think it would take to add this, assuming a programmer who has strong PHP skills (and yes, a good IDE) but isn't familiar with the code? And would the nature of the changes make upgrading overly difficult in the future? Put another way, would there be changes scattered all over the place?



Any estimates on when 1.1 might be released?

I tend to not agree on this one. Sometimes a milestone cant start until the customer says, and therefore no date can be set immediatly. However, one might want to put all milestones, checklists and tasks into the project. Dates being optional should be allowed.