Categories: Master and Project

It would be ideal to have both master/global categories as well as project-specific categories. Perhaps a tab color change to show the differences.

Why? Many projects, while being essentially the same, can share categories to a large extent and this makes the master category structure valid. However in larger implementations (we've 1000+ users, 60+ companies, 300+ active projects) the 1 master categories structure tends to break down, become inflexible and people then don't use the excellent feature.

If a user could create a project-specific category and then submit that to admin to become integrated into a "master" category, that would be pretty cool.

We have a similar situation, however in our case we have a number of different disciplines working on a project, each with different requirements for categories or folders as we call them.

We have around 8-10 disciplines working on a project each requiring between 15-30 categories. The system hasn't worked really, so we are now running each discipline on a separate project, even if we are all working on the same project.

What we really need is sub-categories (categories within categories).
Secondly, if you could add categories to Checklists, our project managers & schedulers will be extremely delighted!

If you could somehow achieve that for the next release we would be very, very, very, very happy:-)

Hello lliya, thanks for your post!

To answer your question, we are an architects practice. We design buildings for our clients and manage their other design consultants for structural & services engineers etc. Together with this we act for our clients with local authorities and administer contracts between them and their construction companies. Each of these separate disciplines or parties have there own demands on AC (Activecollab) categories.

Architects, like most professions such as lawyers, engineers, doctors etc. must abide by strict ‘Quality Assurance Systems’, that are audited by clients, consumer institutions and insurance companies etc. We also need to be able to issue our data to land into a clients or other parties QA systems (yes, it’s very bureaucratic!....but then, if a dispute between parties ends up in court, then your well oiled bureaucracy will save you legal fees!)

I believe AC is one step away from being used as a fresh & modern QA system for professionals; it just needs a bit of tweaking. I have since my post noticed ‘tagging’, which is actually very powerful. However, it seems quite hard to use and difficult to construct a project wide policy on it, but I suspect the answer is there somewhere.

The most successful document management systems use auto-generated tag & card numbers (like the old card systems in public libraries), with project & department prefixes in order to file documents etc. On the library-card they might hold other information such as extra fields for client QA references etc. Importantly, these card numbers can also be created as place-holders, so that the number can appear in an associated document before the actual document is created (good for planning projects and allowing others to work together).

If you guys @ AC were to allow auto-generated tag numbers and library-cards with [proj.no – dept.no – doc.number etc.] for all modules, and introduce an intuitive ‘Tag & Library-Card Management Module’, capable of organizing the tags/cards into folders, (and of cause an advanced search utility), then I think we are really, really, really there!.....or?

Bureaucracy is the vain of professions, because everything needs a tag or reference number, regardless if it’s a letter, document, drawing or an email with attachments. A tag makes it portable, a bit like tagging your luggage before its put on a plane. To be truly honest, I suspect a library-card concept is entry-level for a project-management application to impact on professional spheres, and I would say it’s our only show-stopper at this time (oh and the use of invisible tables to organise pages/comments etc. but we can live without it:-)).

If you guys could fix the tag interface I am sure our project managers will be queuing up to hug you, and some will literally worship the ground you walk on:-)

Really looking forward to hearing from you…