adding Calendaring

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avatar moho Aug 13. 2006. 6:45 pm #11
Adding a Calendaring feature would come in handy.

The Backpack Caledar http://www.backpackit.com/calendar is indeed impressive.
Everyone who saw those videos wanted to use the calendar :).

From their description however, it was not simple to develop it, so maybe in the case of aC it would be more suited as a third party plug-in.

Moho.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Aug 13. 2006. 6:46 pm #12
I was thinking about centralized calendar but just for data presentation, not for data manipulation. Like in Basecamp, just with a bit more power (so you can relate some messages and files with dates - for instance, if you attached meeting notes you can set that they are related with Aug 10th and link to that message will show up on Aug 10th).

Some kind of date related object index.

That is just an idea... Full powered calendar is not planned for activeCollab core. Maybe someone makes a plugin it the future, but that kind of feature is just out of the scope and there are much better solutions out there.
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avatar Ilija Studen Staff Aug 13. 2006. 6:47 pm #13
moho:
Adding a Calendaring feature would come in handy.

The Backpack Caledar http://www.backpackit.com/calendar is indeed impressive.
Everyone who saw those videos wanted to use the calendar :).

I didn't ;) My cellphone reminder and calendar is more than enough for me and I don't need that kind of data on the website. For anything more than personal organization you can use specialized application...

What metters to me the most are not the people who would use calendar after watching a vidio, but those who continue using the calendar 2 years after that. In that case you have a valueable feature that really fits in users life.
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avatar dmurphy Aug 26. 2006. 1:55 am #14
I'm in the process of setting up aC for a video production company. It would be really nice to be able to have a calendar that shows upcoming video shoots and such in a very clear graphical way. Does Google calendar have an API? That would be cool.

Thanks for all the great work you've already put in, and I'm really anticipating 0.7!
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Aug 26. 2006. 5:20 am #15
There is a plan for building it but it will have to wait.
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avatar fvaz Aug 27. 2006. 11:47 pm #16
IMHO the most usable kind of calendar in a collaborative environment is a workgroup calendar such as good old phpgroupware, despite its poor UI.

Unfortunately, there are only a few examples of such calendaring out there (all of them ancient monster groupware apps with LDAP and everything).

How it works? E.g. one user sets a meeting for John, Lisa and Paul, and only them will see the dates in their personal calendars, and have e-mail reminders set for that. This is not a everybody or anyone in the project meeting -- I'm requesting the time of *someone specific*.

Basecamp's milestones aren't suitable for that, nor iCal is. And in my experience with Basecamp, milestones are nearly always ignored by clients if we rely on Basecamp only. If they were person-to-person commitments, that would not happen.

Furthermore, keeping tracks of milestones and a calendar in parallel is a pain, and aC could help us keep track of all three: company-level, project-level dates (as milestones) and user-level dates in one calendar view. Preferrably while keeping it iCal compatible.

I know it's a different beast from what aC does now, and I hope it won't get bloated with an overload of features in the near term -- but that would make it an absolute killer I think.

Just my rants on one point where I think Basecamp is broken yet wildly overrated, and aC could fix them. A plugin, nonetheless, would be great anyway.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Aug 28. 2006. 7:41 am #17
New system will be able to pull out all objects that are related to a specific date and a specific person from all the plugins. Crazy thing is that activeCollab will not know anything about internal structure of plugins so the only way for iCal, RSS or any other technology to work is to make the rules so activeCollab can "speak" with plugins in plain English:

* give me all objects that are related with 2006-12-11 and Peter
* give me all objects that are considered active and upcoming
* give me last 50 most important log entries so I can server them to user through global RSS

Defining set of this interfaces will not be easy, but most of them are obvious and new ones can be added (they you need to wait for a bit while they get adopted).

If we manage to "force" developers to implement this interfaces (plugins developed and supported by aC directly will) then there will be no problem to make any kind of plugin that plays nice with other plugins.
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avatar romdg Aug 28. 2006. 4:38 pm #18
I agree that matching basecamp in its use of calendar to present upcoming milestones would be the way to go. As for marking events on the calendar that may be an add on module later, maybe labelled 'Reminders'.

Project reminders could simply allow for an upcoming event to be detailed with datetime, title, people to remind, and whether to notify them via email. The reminders could be displayed along with milestones in a calendar view.
My 2 cents,
Cheers.
avatar sajseven Dec 1. 2006. 8:47 pm #19
I'd enjoy seeing this feature in the near future! +1
activeCollab Team Member (NOT)
avatar Jan 16. 2007. 6:01 pm #20
Ditto! :)

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