I had been using aC .71 for many months and switched over to ac 1.x about a month ago. Let me start off by saying, I love it. It fills many needs and is providing visibility to our project status where prior there was none.

One of the most exciting things about it is the subscription (notification) functionality, and yet, I feel there are some features missing from this that could be easily solved.

I currently use aC to track game development. Our team currently has over 100 projects in development (with projects being completed added weekly). Here are my observations thus far.

Project Creation: Yes, templates are coming in 1.1 and I am excited to see how this is implemented. Until it is, I cannot say whether it will fill my needs, but I can tell you where my problems currently lie. If I were to "copy" a template, including milestones, I am concerned that I will still have to click, click click in order to change the dates on all the milestones, people etc. To solve my project creation problem (as I create a new project several days a week with 10 to 20 milestones depending on the project) I have created an access database where I populate all the tables by copying and pasting data from a MSProject file, including milestones, checklists and I can run an append query to push all the data very quickly into aC. Perhaps an "Import Excel" option would be helpful to some as well as the API functionality that will assist in this?

People Creation and Projects (and of course adding subscriptions): One of the features that I miss from aC .71 is the ability to add people to projects AS I am adding users to the system. It is fairly common for a new person to come on board and be assigned to 2 or more games. Right now I have to go to each project, add them (which I don't mind that much but it is another "thing" that has to be done in another step) then subscribe them to each milestone. The ability to subscribe by default would be great (see Subscriptions next).

Subscriptions: The wonderful thing about aC is the notification feature. It seams to me that the whole point of aC and people resources is for communication of the status of a project. Therefore, why is the default to NOT subscribe someone to milestones and pages. Again, I have created an Access query that determines the pages, milestones and people on a project and force subscribes everyone. Perhaps when adding people there is a checkbox that by default "Subscribe User To Pages" and Subscribe Users to Milestones" that can be checked or unchecked. It seems that it is easier for users who do NOT want to be notified to unsubscribe, than for me as a project manager to have to manually add everyone (or ask them to subscribe).

Again, I love this project and perhaps there are already solutions that have been discussed such as these that I have not discovered in the forums and I apologize if I have reiterated them.

gmoyle. I strongly agree with all of this especially your last line, highly needed. My preference would be to subscribe everyone on a project to everything as the default and then back off from there.

Current email notifications communicate much stronger message than the one system you are suggesting would communicate - this thing you are getting notified about is of interest to you. It is not likely that you'll receive a notification for something that is not related to you. You don't notice this, but you get used to it really fast. We plan to keep this feature.

On the other hand, we are aware of some problems with clients forgetting to select people to be notified etc. We'll be working on these problems and try to fix them, but not by enabling "email notifications on any action."



In that case use RSS. It displays everything that is displayed in activity logs.