Features planned for 1.0

1, ... 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
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avatar viceroy321 Feb 16. 2007. 1:23 am #71
first of all, let me say how great it is to see s/th like this happening. while bounties are imho not the best way to support OSS, still every contribution is welcome. thank you, i Radeon.

your first bounty is a bit imprecise: what is "reporting" for you ? i looked at netOffice (the software you are using) and they have the following types:
netOffice:

Choose the custom report below based on its description that best fits your reporting needs.
Time Report : This report provides a listing of the hours logged by employee for each project for the previous month and allows you the opportunity to export that information.
Resource Usage : This report summarizes total time logged for projects and organizations.
Completed Task : This report provides a listing of the tasks completed during the previous month.
Overdue Tasks : This report displays a listing of the overdue tasks within all the projects.
Project Phase Status : Shows a basic overview of all active projects and their phases
Project Breakdown : Project list itemizing owner, status, and partner
Person Performance Report : This report provides a listing of employee performance and allows you the opportunity to export that information.
Leave Report : This report provides a listing of employee leaves and allows you the opportunity to export that information.
Member Allocation : This report summarizes member allocation by employee and used for determining an individuals future workload. Only current active and non-client users are selectable and only open projects and tasks are shown.


Is this all "reporting" to you ? Because, software-wise, this is not simply the same task repeated again and again, but quite different tasks. just to clarify...

Your second bounty is imho the most tiresome of them all, but it may (consult Ilija) even go against current overall development. I don't think that the feature "assign to multiple users" is anywhere before 1.2, simply because there are already user groups (companies), which can be expanded (departments & subcontractors). again, ask Ilija, he knows best.

Your third bounty, the Calendar module is already in development, as far as i know, by Ryan Doherty, ( http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/6413/#post6413 ) i believe.

p.s.: let me close with an applause on your company idea. that is a business model that makes sense to me.
avatar Feb 16. 2007. 5:47 am #72
Netoffice report module is a good example of what we would like to see. It's helpful for managers (we use Netoffice internally but want to switch to aC, and our clients love reports for everything) to be able to easily pull up views of all tasks assigned to a particular user (across all projects) or to see all things that are due for a given date or date range. So our aim is to see a little bit of managerial perspective added to aC to help the 'Task managers' do their job more effectively.
avatar Feb 16. 2007. 6:54 pm #73
I am working on the 3rd bounty in some fashion. It's not exactly what iradeon wants (it's a plain 2 week view on the dashboard of upcoming milestones for all projects a user has access to) and right now I'm still getting used to aC's architecture, so I have no idea when it will be done.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Feb 17. 2007. 1:41 am #74
Just a few updates on this three requests. Support for multiple assignees was planned but dropped (read below for reasons). There is a plan for introduction of calendar and reporting tools in 1.0. If you want to see them before 1.0 (in 0.x branch) than you'll need to develop them (bounty is on than?).

About multiple assignees: I've actually said that this feature will be introduce and started implementing it but it soon became obvious that it was a bad idea. Here are the problems:

1. Majority of users will not use it. Also, in most cases tasks can be broken down into smaller peaces so you don't actually need to assign them to the group.
2. Some common tasks started to be more complicated than they should be because of it.
3. Interface for assigning tasks/milestones to people was more complex than it should be.

Existing solution was simpler, easier to use, faster and without unnecessary complexity so I decided to stick with it. It will make reporting really easy in the future so that is also a big plus.
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avatar Feb 20. 2007. 8:35 am #75
Ilija Studen:
About multiple assignees: I've actually said that this feature will be introduce and started implementing it but it soon became obvious that it was a bad idea. Here are the problems:

1. Majority of users will not use it. Also, in most cases tasks can be broken down into smaller peaces so you don't actually need to assign them to the group.

Just to pipe in here, I know that I would use it.

I have just installed aC, and I was trying to find out how to assign a task to 2 or 3 people, because they'll be working on it together.

Just to be clear, the workaround for this (or is this a feature, not a bug?) is to repeatedly create the same task and assign each person that's participating in the collaboration?
Ilija Studen:

2. Some common tasks started to be more complicated than they should be because of it.
3. Interface for assigning tasks/milestones to people was more complex than it should be.

Existing solution was simpler, easier to use, faster and without unnecessary complexity so I decided to stick with it. It will make reporting really easy in the future so that is also a big plus.


I don't know what to say about this. Reasons 2 and 3 don't really seem legitimate to me. First of all, unless I'm missing something, 2 and 3 are basically the same reason. Second of all, Some smart UI work could hide the second/third/etc. assignee UI, unless the user decided to pick additional assignees.

I agree that having a 1:1 relationship between tasks and people is a lot simpler, but that is not how the world works. At least not my world.

And having 3 copies of the same task to support a task with multiple assignees is not helpful: I'd have to make any changes to the task 3 times over, because there are 3 assignees. Not efficient.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Feb 20. 2007. 12:27 pm #76
There is a better workaround. If you are making three copies just to have same tasks listed in My tasks page of three users than you can simply create one tasks, assign it to your company and say in the task text that it is responsibility of Jack, Jill and John.

#2 and #3 are different. First one applies to business logic complexity (business logic is part of application that defines how specific objects interact and what rules apply to them) and second one to interface complexity.

Keeping application and interface simple is pretty legitimate reason to me if feature that we are discussing does not benefit majority of users. It may seam that assigning tasks to multiple people is the only way to go, but situations where you need them are very rare for most users. As I said, in most cases task can be broken down to smaller peaces or you can say in the tasks comment what you want and how you want it handled.

Not having support for multiple assignees is a not a bug. It may be lack of a feature, but definitely not a bug ;)
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avatar sajseven Feb 20. 2007. 6:26 pm #77
I hate to say this... but being a YES-man some of the time could be helpful. I mean, why won't you have more than one developer on the project? No one man can do something this great all alone. Eventually, you'll find that maintaining this project will become to tiring, and we'll all have to switch back to Basecamp again. A lot of the ideas that you put down are legitimate and good. This is a perfect example?

Yes, it'll be hard. Yes, it'll take time. But that's the fun of being a developer, right? You get challenges that change the way you think and code. This is what I enjoy. Why not you?

Try signing up for a free Basecamp account and have a look at how they do the tasks section. It is very simple, uses AJAX and yet it incorporates so many good features. I've created a tasks list program that is even simpler and can even perform subtasks. It has AJAX and all that. It was SIMPLE.

I mean, I'm a beginner in developers terms. It took me about a day. You, on the other hand, are very clever and a good developer. You could finish this (recoding the tasks area) in about three hours. Why not? A challenge? That sounds good!
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avatar Feb 21. 2007. 7:35 am #78
Ilija Studen:
There is a better workaround. If you are making three copies just to have same tasks listed in My tasks page of three users than you can simply create one tasks, assign it to your company and say in the task text that it is responsibility of Jack, Jill and John.


This workaround won't work for me, and (I suspect) many others.

My company has ~30 people that will be using aC. If I implement things like this, then everyone will see all tasks that more than one person will be working on in 'My Tasks', and will have to look at the notes to see if they are working on it. That won't work. In a company of 5 people that might be tolerable, but not for me.

Ilija Studen:
Keeping application and interface simple is pretty legitimate reason to me if feature that we are discussing does not benefit majority of users. It may seam that assigning tasks to multiple people is the only way to go, but situations where you need them are very rare for most users. As I said, in most cases task can be broken down to smaller peaces or you can say in the tasks comment what you want and how you want it handled.


I guess we disagree on whether or not this will benefit the majority of users. I know that it will benefit me, and I suspect that many users have the same need to add multiple assignees...
avatar viceroy321 Feb 22. 2007. 1:49 am #79
sajseven:

Try signing up for a free Basecamp account and have a look at how they do the tasks section. It is very simple, uses AJAX and yet it incorporates so many good features. I've created a tasks list program that is even simpler and can even perform subtasks. It has AJAX and all that. It was SIMPLE.

I mean, I'm a beginner in developers terms. It took me about a day. You, on the other hand, are very clever and a good developer. You could finish this (recoding the tasks area) in about three hours. Why not? A challenge? That sounds good!

@saj: i completely understand your problem, and agree with your core message, but keep in mind: starting a simple app that does a simple feat from scratch is a completely different thing altogether from adding the same simple feat to an existing app, which has more than a megabyte of code spread over 250 files. it will become much easier (at least thats what i believe) as Ilija finishes extracting Angie, the core business logic from aC. mhhmm.. i should have to look at svn.

having said that, i'm very interested in your simple one-day-of-work-tasklist. if you would like to talk about it or might possibly even share it, please contact me. [myusernamehere]@gmail.com

@Ilija: please change the forum. if you are logged out, while the "quote"-buttons disappear, you still see the textarea at the bottom, even though it will not accept your content. if you click submit everything is gone.
avatar Mar 17. 2007. 7:25 pm #80
For me it would be really useful to be able to specify a time alongside a milestone date. There can be multiple tasks within one day and some of those may need to be concluded at a specific time on that day (for example a meeting - or work for review at a set meeting).

Also, it would be good to determine relationships with milestones so that if one changes other dependents change also.

Of course the old favourites, Gantt charts, time tracking etc. etc. etc.

Great job :-)

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