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Bart N. on Apr 18. 2008. 7:55 am
I can't really see a clear difference ( in the demo anyway) between "discussion" and "pages".
Also the difference between "milestones" and "tickets" isn't all that clear?

Anyone care to explain this a little more?

Thanks in advance.
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Ilija Studen on Apr 18. 2008. 10:06 am
Hi,

Every of the listed features have a lot of similarities, but also there is always something specific about them that makes them more suitable for some tasks than for other.

Pages are for collaborative writing. What is unique about them is their support for versioning and organization in tree like structure (you can have chapters, sub-chapters etc without limit in number of levels). Here at A51 we use them for all sort of writing - blog posts, articles etc.

Discussions section is a little forum inside of every project.

Tickets are bigger tasks. They support history and time tracking, subtasking, attachments etc. They are so feature rich that some people use them as subprojects.

Milestones are used to mark inportant project stages. For instance, if you work on software project you may have milestones like this:

Product v1.0 Beta
Product v1.0 RC1
Product v1.0 RC2
Product v1.0 Final
Product v1.1 Beta
...

Tickets, pages, discussions etc can be (optionally) associated with a milestone so you know witch stage of project development they belong to.

Concepts are pretty basic and things fall in place easily when you get a bit more familiar with activeCollab. You just need to use it on a real project to see how all things fit together.
activeCollab team member | LinkedIn
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Bart N. on Apr 18. 2008. 10:42 am
Hi Ilija,

thanks for the reply. I've bought a corporate license and I am testing the full version right now ...
You'll be hearing from me later :)
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kthomas on Apr 18. 2008. 3:09 pm
While I understand the page/discussion distinction, there are times when I wonder if it is entirely ... functional in many actual use cases.

Consider: generally we wish to post a site/project plan, and then have a discussion about it, with the project lead modifying the document as they go on.

Currently, this means the origin of the discussion must be posted as a page, with a follow-up discussion about that page referencing the page. It would be more convenient and logical to have the live document we're discussing embedded at the top of the discussion.

That could, of course, be accomplished by making the original post in a discussion revisable, or by allowing objects to be embedded in other pages...
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Ilija Studen on Apr 18. 2008. 3:14 pm
Pages support comments. If you need to discuss a page content and revisions do that on the page itself.
activeCollab team member | LinkedIn
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kthomas on Apr 18. 2008. 3:17 pm
You tell that to some of my clients who have MBAs ;)
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jhohl on May 2. 2008. 4:27 pm
I was also wondering what the difference is between checklists (which contain "tasks") and tickets. Both show up on the assignments page.

Follow-up question: what is the criteria for something to show up on the list of "Task I am Responsible For"? Is it the same as "Tasks Assigned to Me"?
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Ilija Studen on May 2. 2008. 6:48 pm
Key similarity between checklists and tickets is that both can have subtasks. On top of that tickets can have comments, attachments and can be sorted in categories. Checklists does not support that and are more like simple lists of tasks. Tickets are like bigger tasks that involve discussion and can evolve through time.

Tasks, tickets and milestones can any number of assignees but only one of them is responsible. That is the person in front of a group who is responsible for task to be completed.
activeCollab team member | LinkedIn
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jhohl on May 5. 2008. 4:43 pm
Thank you. Is there any way to view the tasks for which I am responsible for "managing" even if I am not supposed to actually "do" the task? For project managers to see the list of tasks across all people and projects would be extremely helpful.
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Ilija Studen on May 5. 2008. 4:46 pm
It is possible to see other people tasks, but only in v1.1 (currently in beta).
activeCollab team member | LinkedIn

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