Interesting question...

Default the installation so that updates are OFF. in a complex and multi-tiered corporate network, the application server may not be able to reach out to the Internet or to the activeCollab website.

This manifests like Apache is choking to death and then finally ( if the timeout is not set too long) the script dies. If you have time to root through logs and chase errors down into the VersionsFeed.class.php, you are fine. If you don’t have time, the delivery time from install to functional can be many days or in fact, permanently give the appearance that “this thing just will not work for us”.

By installing with the update feature set to zero, activeCollab would install cleanly without worries of proxy servers, content filters or the fact that activeCollab’s website is blacklisted on some security guys “little bad-site list”.

This is more a Corportate America, marketing/political move than it is anything else, so please weigh it as such.

BTW: activeCollab is extremely cool, relevant and the update function is a brilliant implementation.

To be able to add a user to a project via the project page, rather than admin > clients > permissions. Otherwise, I’m very happy with it!

* Give a client person (client admin, sort of) access to add and edit it’s own people/company info.
* Allow a logo to be display in the top header througout the whole site, and perhaps a logo for each project
* Add a “progress bar” for the whole project (based on milestones or tasks finished, perhaps?) and for each task list.
* Hide “Tags:—” when there are no tags on items.
* Make more compatible with the Opera browser (for example the dropdowns in the upper right menu, issues on tabs while zoomed in, etc)

Otherwise a great product! =)

From the bugtracker: 181 and 183. In the people section, updates and password changes are keeping me from using this for my clients. Everything else works pretty well for me.

“Commenting guidelines” for every description field (as here) (with maybe the ability to hide/unhide)

Integration with google calendar with alarms on due dates.

The ability to add meta data to a project on the add/edit project page. I use activecollab to manage over 1800 projects. On our installation, I updated the project table and add/edit project form and project page to allow for the collection and display of addition project info beyond “project title” and “description”.

Also – as far as I can tell I would like the ability to theme similar to Wordpress in the sense that you can just upload a theme to a directory and it just works flawlessly.

This functionality may already be there, but I dont think I can just add a task to a project without it being a “task list” would be nice to simplify the ability to add either “Task” or “Task List”

Thanks for listening.

- The ability to include the text of a message in notifications (rather than just a notification that a message was sent with a url to the actual message) I was going to go in and do this myself but as long as you’re asking :D

Google Calendar Integration would be cool…. but what I really would like to see is a templating-system… an easy way to change the look&feel of this amazing app!

I would like the size of a task’s edit box to be larger. I have tried looking for the code to do it myself but am unable to find it.

I’m not sure if this would be categorized as a new feature or changing an existing one, so take it as whatever it needs to be taken as.

It would be great if you could send notifications that a file had been uploaded instead of having to compose a message and attach a file just to let people know that you have uploaded a file.

For example, say I have a file that I want people to comment on. If I upload the file to the file section of a project, I have to e-mail them separately to tell them that I’ve uploaded a file (or put a message in the project). Then, if we all want to comment on the file, there are no notifications when a comment is added to the file. That would be extremely helpful when you’re collaborating on a file.

Thanks. ActiveCollab is a priceless tool for us. You guys are awesome!

I’ve been using AC for 3 or 4 months now. There are a couple things that have started to bug me a lot.

It is a pain to navigate between projects. There is justs lots of clicks. So one thing that would be nice is configuration on the project level or user, or both, where you can set the default page. I know some people might like it, but I never once have used the log on the overview. I just want to see my task lists. So it would be nice if I could say, on this project that I am managing, give me the log. But this project that I need to do things in, give me the task list right away.

Another idea is to add to the breadcrumb functionality that you have in place. So say I have this right now

» Dashboard » Website1 » Tasks » Index

If next to each item you have the same little drop down button next to each item in the “account, projects, administration” box. So if I click on the dropdown button next to website1 it will look like

» Dashboard » Website1 » Tasks » Index
> Website2
> Website3
> Website4

So if I click on website3 I will be in the tasks for website3

» Dashboard » Website3 » Tasks » Index

I hope that makes sense. So yeah, those are two quick thoughts that I think would help.

OH! Also…you absolutely have to add notes to tasks. This is such a huge deal at my work. We use this to dish out work for over 20 different interns. It would be nice if they could but a note if something happened or came up or if they made progress on a specific task.

I would like to be able to ad one message to several projects.

@Ilija,

Those bugs persist in my installation of 0.7.1. I still use the tool because it’s wonderful, I’ve just not opened it up for my clients to try to test it.

I would really like to see Gantt charts.

In two formats: – A view in the dashboard of all projects so that you can easily see how your projects are split across the year
– A second view where each project has its tasks laid out in Gantt form.

I don’t think automatically calculated dependencies are critical at this stage, you can easily see by start and end date when tasks are supposed to happen so add each subsequent task after the previous one

I’d love task management more like MantisBT, then I’d dump Mantis. I’m hoping to see this in v0.7.5.

Private messages: all comments should default to being private. I actually think they should be forced to be private, without the option of making them viewable to clients.

It is WAY too easy to accidently forget to check the radio button to make a comment private, and have a client read something they aren’t supposed to.

I (and other people here at my workplace) think the main navigation bar (at the top) should be “flipped horizontally” so to speak.. at the top you should have

“Dashboard >> Overview”

and below that, “the sub-menu”, “Overview, My Projects, My Tasks”.

When you enter a project:

“Dashboard >> Project X >> Overview”
(submenu below)”Overview, Messages, Tasks etc….”

Come to think of it, you may also skip the “CurrentlySelectedItemInSubmenu” in the top-bar since you see well and clear that you’re currently in the Overview (or messages) for the current project:

“Dashboard >> Project X”
“Overview, Messages, Tasks etc….”

If you’re not in a project you just get:

“Dashboard”
“Overview, My Projects, My Tasks”

I would much like to see comments (or notes) to tasks. Now what we have to do is write comments into the task texts which is sometimes a little unclear.

Otherwise aC is really a great app!

I’m really getting to be huge fan of AC and using it to manage marketing projects for my Dôjô.

My main issue would be general ergonomics which I have to cope with every time I try to get some new partner / collab to join in on the fun.

Off the bat :
– Project Logos in heading. – Format navigational list elements such as top-right block drop downs

Maybe a lot of this can be done through theme support …

Once again thanks and congrats for this excellent tool.

Chris
Paris – France

aC is a really interesting tool, i think these features could improve the product :
* being able to duplicate a project in order to have a typical project (for a web agency by example) ready for duplication
* having a real international tool so that users can configure the language of the application
* i don’t know if this bug is corrected but i think it a very important bug.

Two things:
* allow drag-n-drop for task reordering
* always show the “My Tasks” link, instead of having to go through Dashboard each time

Otherwise, fantastic app!

I’d love to see a dashboard that allows you to see what everybody else in the company has on their plate as far as projects and task lists go. Viewing by company members instead of projects…

* The ability to assign people to a project when you first create it (all one the same screen)

* Allow none administrators to create/manage their own projects.

* As per comment #21 – Comments on tasks (and task-lists, and milestones)! (This might be out of scope, but, man, it would be very helpful)

* As per comment #19 – All Messages and Comments default to private.

* As per comment #13 – Notification of file uploads/updates/etc.

* As per comment #10 – The content of the Message/Comment included in the notification email.

Thank you.

Would love it if the Dashboard overview would show “Upcoming Milestones” instead of just Overdue or Today Milestones.

Presentation of the Upcoming Milestones in a “calendar-format” – it’s fine to be able to a see a list, but I think most people would prefer a more visual view.

PRIORITY

* Comment #25 – dashboard with global view of all projects and tasks lists order by company members instead of ONLY projects

* Comment #23 – having a real international tool so that users can configure the language of the application

NEXT

* Comment #14 – add breadcrumbs with dropdown navegation

* Comment #21 – Comments on tasks

* Comment #10 – The content of the Message/Comment included in the notification email.

Congratulations for the good job!

Rodrigo Paiva – Brazil – South America

minor, but helpful: auto parsing urls to form links in comments/messages/project description. (i.e. i enter “project for www.foo.com” in project description, when that’s rendered back it’s as ”...www.foo.com...”

ability to duplicate an entire project structure, sans comments/files, with a click. I think this could probably be manually done with some creative mysql work…

Personnaly I interested in timetracking

But for project think plugins would be more profitable

ability to move task items up and down to prioritize

Message and comment text in RSS, so we don’t have to take the extra steps of opening a browser and logging into aC to read the content.

Using “Site name” and not the company name for TITLE-Element.

I agree with those comments :

Comment #4 : Display bugs in Opera browser, project-level progress bar and header logo

Comment #10 : Include content of messages/comments in the notifications’ text

Comment #13 : Notifications for file activity

Comment # 17 : Gantt charts !! Absolutely !

Comment #21 : Comments on tasks – That’s a must do, it would be SOOO helpful

Comment #23 : Per user language setting. I have clients in the US and here in France, and I have to switch the app to one language or another all the time… Not cool !

Comment #24 : Drag’n’drop tasks reordering is also an absolute must have, Netvibes-style.

Comment #34 : Being able to have a site title different from the owner’s company’s name would be nice.

And here are a few more :
– Why not use a WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE or FCK-Editor for text editing ? It generates messy HTML, I agree, but it allows non-technical users to format their text easily. And you can limit the kind of HTML it can generate, for example to limit it to bold, italic, numbered and unordered lists, a fixed list of styles (big red warning, title 1, title 2, etc.). Could be nice…
– To be able to have more than 2 states for tasks, so it could, for example, be used for bugtracking (Right now I have to use a Trac setup to do just that, when all I’m really using in it is the ticket tracking system) : you could have states like submitted, assigned, accepted, done/fixed, etc. Or even custom states.

But on the other hand, tasks with just 2 states is really the perfect tool for todo lists (could use an optional deadline field tho), so the best way to implement multi-state tasks would be, I believe, to have the choice between normal 2-states tasks or spiced-up n-states tasks when creating a new task list. Just my 2 cents… ;)

Anyway, you did an amazing job with activeCollab, so thank you VERY much for this wonderful tool !

Jean-Baptiste

I’d love to be able to re-order tasks lists within a project. Tasks within a list can be re-ordered, but the task lists themselves appear in the order they were added.

- Reorder tasks regardsless of projects in the My Tasks list. – As a Manager, I would like to see what are the tasks(regardsless of project) of other developers and have the ability to reorder them.

First, thanx for great application. Than I must say I am one of those who checks your site every 2-3 days awaiting for new version ;)
Giving direct answer to question what is first that I wanna see changed in aC is time tracking. As I see that other also put several things, let me also put wish list:

1. Totally agree on navigation issues above
2. Milestone diagrams (always get demands for them from clients, especially when I work on partnership projects) – pdf preferably :)
3. User reports – having one task assigned to multiple users gives me sometimes false feeling task is done. If I had daily user reports (attached to tasks), same way tasks are attached to milestones, I would have exact project state every day. Also user reports should have direct link with files, so user could at end of working day write report down and attach his/hers work files.

This is for now, I have more wishes, but even gold fish fulfills only three :) Hope I shall get mine fulfilled. Many wishes from others too mean that you have full hands of work, and I shall keep on with checking for new version! Keep on with good work!

Formatting, moving of tasks and notifications are available already in some form/places but it would be great if these could also be applied so that:

1. We can format text in a Task

2. Be able to move tasks to a task list in another project, not just another task list within a project.

3. Notification to assigned person when a task is updated

4. Some automatic numbering of tasks that is visible and referenceable, so one can refer to Task X.

As per comment #24

* always show the “My Tasks” link, instead of having to go through Dashboard each time

Would be a good ides to place this link in the right column and use a separate link for “My tasks” and “My Milestones”

Overview: all tasks
Project selected: Only tasks of that project

It would be nice to have ‘priority’ (simple integer field) property for projects which will affect sort ordering on various pages (most importantly, ‘My Tasks’). Or at least an ability to sort projects by milestone time…

A transfer folder to upload large files via FTP and the option to import them via the admin files section.

Task detailed description, task commenting and task folding. :) This are the features that i miss the most.

AC it’s a very useful app for me, but there a few things that could be AC more powerful yet:

1. A way to clone/duplicate a project, for people like me who work in several projects at the same time, and similiar projects, would be nice to have a few project templates, so I just choose one template and start to work…

2. I really need to reorder my tasks and not set all tasks in order.

3. Comment a task, or a way to write some messages to specific task and not only for a milestone.

4. create multiple tasks at a time, by now when I create a task list, I can write 5 tasks, but If I need 10 tasks, I have to include the other 5 one by one…

Thats all, and thanks for this great app.

I’d like to see basic text formatting functionality for task entries. Other than that, everything seems fine :)

The most basic area for me and the one I use most is the task lists so I support the suggestions in #21, #24, #40 and #43. My addition to this list would be to be able to add tags to individual tasks not just a task list.

In order to track what an employee is doing during workhours, in other words to be able to track if he is not working hard enough, it should be something like USER DASHBOARD. Of course, if you make them log all activity right as I do in my company. It does take a bit of time, but it produces far better productivity overall.

CURRENT DASHBOARDS: OVERALL, PROJECT
NEW DASHBOARD: USER

****

USER DASHBOARD Features:
1. ADMIN could access each user’s dashboard
2. USER could access only his dashboard.
3. Filter: view today, view by day, view by week, view by month
4. Printer friendly version are a must

One thing I forgot. I meant only dashboard, not the subsections like messages, tasks… I only need to see exactly the same dashboard as it is now, but only to filter it by user and by time.

I do not need no more details than what the dashboard produces, in order to have a good overview of what is an employee is doing over time. This way I can monitor and spot if someone is not working even if I am not there for entire month.

P.S. WAP version of the site would be very very interesting :)

What he said.

We need a formatting guide for messages.

Like on Basecamp:

Bold phrase
Italic phrase
* Bulleted list
1. Numbered list
> Indented block
h1. Big header
h2. Normal header
Google

I would also very much like to see an option where days to/since a milestone are counted only in terms of business days as opposed to real days. For instance, I just encountered a milestone that said it was four days overdue when in reality it was only two (because two of those days were weekend.) If I could configure holidays that would be even better.

For me, simple: Being able to set a priority order in tasks. Just to sort them, would be perfect!
And for an administrator, being able to view tasks assigned to another person (to manage a team, supervise production).

Thanks!

I would like to see better file management options :

Move files to folders after they are uploaded
Download of folders vs. individual files only
.zip of folders on server

This is a wonderful tool, I’m glad to have found it!

Previous users pretty much covered all of my wants from aC, namely:
– Allow a logo to be displayed in the top header throughout the whole site, like in Basecamp
– “Commenting guidelines” for every description field (as here) (ability to hide/show)
– Being able to set a priority order in tasks. Just to sort them, would be perfect!
– For an administrator, being able to view tasks assigned to another person (to manage a team, supervise production)

I’d like to be able to assign a task and a due-date to an individual or to a group of individuals.

I would like to have a re-writable document area like the “writeboard” in Projectpath. I thought ac had it at one point, but I must have flaked on that because I can’t find any mention of it.

* On main dashboard page that lists all projects, it would be nice to have them arranged by company, like BaseCamp does, rather than alphabetically as it is now. We work with a lot of different companies and being able to have them alphabetically and then their projects beneath them alphabetically would be great.
* Having a default theme that takes up more screen width (maybe 90% of the screen-width), there’s a lot of wasted space now, and everything feels a bit “squashed” together.

View tasklists by milestone would be nice.

Totally agree on #56: writeboards are multi-use text references about anything.

I currently share Google Docs, but having them inside aC would be lots easier for us and clients.

More importante than that, however, is to deal with minor things that may ruin user experience: – use the whole browser width; – change DHTML project selection to a dropdown (it is soo hard to aim at that tiny triangle on the top of the page! if I click on Projects there’s one more page load); – make the active projects I’m working on available all times in a sidebar (redundantly with the dropdown) – in task lists, add tasks without reloading the page (for saving time and for consistency with other ajax goodness around) – ditto for editing tasks in task list: no reloads please – use meaningful URLs through htaccess: /myproject/mytasklist/addtask, for instance

best regards and congrats for the app!

On graphs:
On scrumwiki there is a litle chart of changes vs days, that they use for sprints.
I can use it on projects with my clients…

Thanks for a great product. My requested modifications to current features include:
– ability to add a message or task to all (or selected) projects; I have a final checklist for things to be done before a project can be considered complete. I’d like to be able to do this without having to manually add it to each project.
– drag and drop re-order of tasks… or even just the ability to ‘move up’ and ‘move down’ for a task in the list. The numbering system is akward.
– ‘comment on anything’ and ‘attach a file to anything’ are crossed off on the list of coming soon items. ( I assume that means they are competleted, not that they are no longer planned to be added) However, I don’t see how I can comment or attach files to tasks. Am I missing something? I’m running the latest version.
– ability to upload large files; this is a PHP configuration issue right? How do I change that?

hi,
cool stuff… i am using it in my school cause i have some teamwork. i discovered activecollab few months ago when i was looking for a prject management system. Definitively there is space for a product such as activecollab.
I saw that when you create a new message you can send a mail to different people involved in the project. I was wondering why not being able to sent a mail for everykind of objects like tasks, milestones…

Thanks again for your work.

ps: long life to activecollab !!! :D

Localization would be very nice – i would certainly help in making a danish translation!

VERY IMPORTANT: Allow other members of the comapny to add projects without being admin!

If this cant happen then you have to rely on the administratr(s) which is no good if they arent available. The whole site slows down.

You cant just make everyone an admin!

Thats my no1 :D

time tracking and assigning files to anything (messages, tasks, milestones).

I would like to see an easy way to backup my aC installation and transfer it to another server (I know you can do this with MySQL and copying but this is not very end user friendly).

Better and faster interface (Ajax…). I hate it when I need the whole page to refresh when I click a checkbox. Apart from that there are other things that I agree on with other people here. I love ActiveCollab and hope to see it grow better.

i see that this has been mentioned before, but i also want to throw my hat in the ring for:

message text in notification emails!

i love ActiveCollab – thanks for your skills and efforts!

Here’s a really simple thing:

On the Admin projects page, check marks appear next to each project, and automatically update as ‘done’ or ‘not done’ when you click the check mark. It may not be readily apparent that this is what the check box is for. In similar implementations, a check box might mean to delete everything that is checked.
In the header cell above the check box, put ‘Done’ or ‘Completed’ or a green check image or whatever to let people know that’s what the column is for.

Alternatively, it might be nice to have a multistate system. In Progress – Billed – Paid – Done – On hold – Waiting for Review – Everything Not Archived – Archived – etc. Maybe admin could edit this categories. You could view all the projects that are currently in Billing, recently Done or Archived in separate views.

Less simple:

I’m using it to upload aerial photos from clients who want plans drawn for neighborhood and city block rehabilitation. I’d like to see the following:

a. An upload progress bar for large uploads.

b. Total available space limit for each client company

c. A limit bar that shows how much space is left for the company.

Integration with google calendar and Writeboard / Wiki like feature would be awsome !

Not to jump on the Gantt chart bandwagon, but having the ability to set Start dates and inter-dependencies on milestones, sub-milestones, etc. would make this package much more enticing.

Often when scheduling a project, it is nice to have smaller milestones which comprise a larger milestone. Also, in a project many things are serial in nature—as an electrical engineer, I cannot enter production phase before design is complete. That does not stop my boss from wanting to know when production starts.

The ability to transfer large files is critical for the type of projects I work on. Uploading any file size is working fine; downloading small files works great—downloading large file is broken. Actually… some form of progress indicator would be handy.

Make the installation process easier: make a script to test the configuration, one that points out small things to correct in order to have a functioning example.
Say, installing in LAMP is easy and straightforward, but there are oodles of WinBoxes that have limitations- installation on those machines becomes an guessing process. This is important

Other idea: teams often work in projects that are similar in nature and scope: much of the time the only changes are milestones and deadlines. If we could have a “copy project” and then tweak the resulting thing to adapt it to the “new” project, things would be easier.

In our environment, we generate tonnes of email notifications when a number of users are on the system.

The volume of emails are annoying – but worse – we find that people do not check every email when they are received. (For example, if they had click one of the links to read the message and comments.)

This means that comments posted to OTHER messages sometimes go overlooked.

//

It would be great if there was a cron function that checked the site every 10 minutes, and sent out ONE email for EACH message that was created or commented on.

The email could say, “users X, Y and Z” have posted to the “x message”.

A more specific subject line would be nice too. :)

//

All in all, we love the app. Thanks so much for all your efforts.

tags as a cloud instead of list

You asked for the first thing, we would like to see changed, that is “kind of” broken:

a few formatting-buttons. no fat WYSIWYG-editor, please not, but only a few formatting button, working like those in wikipedia and dokuwiki. it makes editing reasonably simple, and it additionally makes people learn the syntax.

i also agree with #19, even though it is that minor

p.s.: should you need someone to compile a statistic, i would be happy to offer my help. 70 comments in 7 days is quite a bit.

To me activeCollab seems to be a well thought tool. Even if there are lots of thing I’d like to see and change, there is one important thing that needs to be addressed:

FILE HANDLING.

I think that this is the core of project management… organize and use resources.
And funny enough, I think that the “Files” tab is the less usable of the whole activeCollab project. Why not integrate something like Relay? It’s AJAX and very usable. Or, as a better alternative, an integration with Box.net, through the Box Enabled project..

Been using ac for one month now, love it, cancelled basecamp.

I would like to see a dropdown calendar view to pick dates on new milestones, I always forget what date next friday is.

Also the ability to quickly add repeating milestones to track monthly status reports.

Be able to assign dates to individual tasks, also add notes and progress meter on tasks.

Keep up the great work!

Piggybacking off of #78 – the limitation on file sizes imposed by the environment’s PHP.ini file can be irritating at time. Question: Would WebDAV capability both provide the ability to upload a whole bunch of files at once and work around per-file size limitations?

Might be best offered as a plug in only for those who need it.

I’ve been using AC in real business for two weeks and I find it very usefull.
It delivers the essential features that small businesses, or individuals need to manage efficiently their projects, especially when working with several people located in different places.

One thing I would find usefull: “chat, chat room feature”.
AC currently indicates who has been active in the past 15 mn.
Presence information could be displayed, with the possibility to “chat” with people that are on-line. Possibility to have “chat rooms”, where people that are connected could do chat-conferencing would be nice as well.

I am used to checking available open source tools. AC is one of the most usefull and easy tool that I saw recently.

To Greg Brooks: Yes Greg, maybe this would help.. I saw some interesting opensource PHP classes that do the job, only I couldn’t test them. I’ll look for a link and will post it.
Also, I found some PHP classes which let me access my box.net account from within activeCollab. It’s wonderful! The problem is that you can only browse and download files.. No breadcrumbs.. no upload.. preview.. they’re too basic. If there’s some Php programmer interested (Ilja? Are you there : ) ) I can look for the link and post it here. Maybe, with the new API documentation, it won’t be that difficult job, would it?

I’ve often wanted to assign one task to multiple people. It would be nice to have access to check boxes for assigning project members rather than a pull-down menu.

On the other hand it might be better to just keep the drop-down and to generate a list of check-boxes of all the other users in the project with an onselect event or something. That way, you could continue with the current paradigm, enforce a “primary owner” and also allow us to associate other users with a task.