Archive for January, 2009|Monthly archive page
Teamwork 4.0 released
Teamwork's 4 "about" popup.
Download Teamwork 4. Today, 30th of January, 2009, Teamwork 4 is available for download. Get it here:
http://www.twproject.com/download.page
In the same page you can generate a 30 days evaluation license. The multi-platform installer includes an upgrader from version 3; you can buy both new and upgrade licenses here:
http://www.twproject.com/licensing.page
The base cost is 90 Euro per non-expiring license.
(If you live in a country where the currency is now particularly weak with respect to the Euro (e.g. Brazil), apply for a discount here. There are free licenses for blogger / journalist reviewers, as usual.)
See the introductory video and download the user guide here:
http://www.twproject.com/documentation.page
What we achieved. Producing Teamwork 4 was really difficult, because we had several aims that we wanted to pursue with this release:
- get more integration between the different sections of Teamwork
- expand project management functionality with resource management and business processes
- create a “Teamwork talks” set of functionalities, so that Teamwork would natively interact with the various services which now are widely used to track one’s activity, from Google apps, to Twitter and Subversion
- deeply revise the user interface, by:
- keeping “embracing the web”, but empowering the basic url request – page display cycle with dynamical web parts that allow in place and multi-line editing
- make it easier to reach information, through silently smart search functions and empowered dashboards (see the future blog post on group ranking)
The last point was particularly intense, as we had to “absorb” the fact that the web itself is a source of user interface standards, and it has stopped trying to imitate other platforms.
User requests. Many of the changes and improvements came from recurring user requests: have an extended and printable user guide, interface translation in German and Spanish, in place task tree edit, Subversion integration, and many others. So post your requests on our feedback service, and you’ll see them realized with a little patience.
Features of version 4. How can a short blog post summarize Teamwork release 4? There is just too much, both conceptually and functionally. There is only one way to get to know Teamwork 4: see the intro video, download and install the application, give it a try, maybe have a look at the new user guide to get more in depth on the subjects that most interest you.
A very synthetic way of telling what’s new in version 4 is by using simply a tag cloud of the user guide contents:
Tag cloud of Teamwork 4 user guide
Thanks. The team that produced Teamwork 4 is here:
http://www.twproject.com/staff.page
Thanks to all users of version 3 that provided feedback and special thanks to beta testers and translators. Have a good evaluation!
Teamwork 4 in German – and in Spanish
Task editor in German.
Really nice that Teamwork 4 will include a complete German translation of the interface (for an extended discussion of how Teamwork deals with language issues, see this previous post). By the way, Teamwork 4 will be out this Friday (Janaury 30th, 2009).
P.S.: Also Spanish is almost done:
Attempts to manage work with social networks: Twitter limits
One of the open discussions I’ve found wondering on the web is about people who try to manage their work with social networks. Since I’m a developer of a work management software and at the same time I’m social network addicted, I find this topic quite interesting. My first consideration is that social networks can be used to manage work only if your needs are limited, for example if you need only to log your time; for this, some use Twitter. This friendly little tool lets you share brief contents, send message to friends and trace activity in time (by scrolling it 
).
Reading blog discussions about social tools for management, I gather that who uses Twitter for work management, uses it also to log personal experiences and communicate with friends.
Probably if you write a twit every hour, it comes natural to use Twitter as time tracking tool, moreover with the @tag you can send personal message, creating a sort of work group. Using Twitter in this case is a good way to save time considering that you will probably spend the same time on it even if you don’t use it for work!
However I can’t believe that users are satisfied from this service. The other day I read the post of Seth Godin Love(and annoying) and I immediately connected his words with my consideration about Twitter. Seth Goding said that
“If people love it, they’ll forgive a lot. They’ll talk about it. They’ll promote it. They’ll come back. They’ll be less price sensitive. They’ll bring their friends. They’ll work with you to make it better.”
But he doesn’t say that if people love it, they also probably will use it in a way that hasn’t been foreseen: using Twitter to manage work is a very clear example of this, and it happens all the time with many other applications like Excel, for example. This is fine, as long as you don’t want to extract information afterwards….
Twitter can log your activity but it can’t tell you which twits go where and how much time you have spent on a specific project, you can only calculate it by hand.
I think that the needs of work groups that really want to organize their work can’t be satisfied from what Twitter gives; it wasn’t meant to give more, it’s the above usage which is forced.
My conclusion is that some people use Twitter to manage work only because they love using Twitter, and having it as work tool sometimes is a good excuse to use it frequently 
.
Silvia Chelazzi
Follow me on Twitter (I have no fear of paradox)
Scrum tools: visually creating Sprints – a mockup
Filed under: issue tracking, project management | Tags: agile, scrum
Comments (2) Following Skype, Twitter and e-mail discussions with Rick Cogley, looking for example at Scrum-ban, we thought about how to improve the current Scrum module, creating a more “visual” interface for creating Sprints. So this is our first mockup of the new “create sprint” page:
Teamwork visual Sprint creation page- first update
Now if you have a suggestion for this interface, just download the mock-up here, modify it and publish the link on our UserVoice or send it back to me (ppolsinelli at open – lab dot com).
Teamwork is (fortunately) not just a specific Scrum tool, in fact in the same company different methodologies may be used in different projects; sometimes only some parts of a methodology may be used. For example, in Open Lab we use pair programming and short cycles, taken from XP, but we do not use test-first coding; Teamwork is flexible enough to adapt to all these, so that you may use a single tool to manage differently structured projects.
First update. Received a mock-up with suggestions from Mr. Cogley:
Cogley update #1
adopted all, apart from “info on tasks” as left side is a single backlog hence from a single task. Thanks!
How Teamwork is made with Teamwork
Filed under: IT integration, project management, usage | Tags: Teamwork usage
Leave a Comment The guys developing Teamwork are indeed using Teamwork for managing work. How we do that? Well, even in our small group, people have different functions and habits. We have two areas, production and accounting; inside prodution, there are people with different roles, and consequently see and use different data, to which the interface adapts seamlessly. We extensively use the dashboard customization functionalities so that everybody sees what they want.
- Some issues editable in place.
Teamwork 4 has won the long-standing war with paper. We have to confess that for some short-lived issues, some of us (including me) were still using post-its and notes on paper as an integration of issues. But Teamwork 4 won: the Ajax issue multi-editor is just too practical. There is no more paper on our desks; add Balsamiq mockups for replacing paper interface drafts, and the coverage is complete.
We cross post issues and bugs, which we get notified thanks to the subscription engine.
- Worklog reads from Twitter and Subversion
Teamwork worklogs are inserted with help from Twitter and Subversion logs, which Teamwork 4 does natively.
A section which is widely used is the agenda integrated with meetings, which as it synchronizes with our e-mail clients, is quite practical.
We use boards too, for example to collect notes for our technical meetings. Careful collection of worklogs allows to monitor costs, and also comparison between releases, cost per team etc. .
For authentication, our Teamwork is integrated with our Active Directory. As we are “advanced users” , we have added to the scheduled jobs a “SiteAliveTester” job which tests that our servers are up and sends e-mail alerts.
- Strategic company news.
We have added some parts to the defaults, such as RSS reader, user voice reader.
Of course we also use news, for example to publish scores of our table-tennis tournament!
Teamwork and multilinguism
Filed under: IT integration, usage | Tags: web application internationalization
Comments (5) 
Teamwork 4 interface in German
Teamwork’s translation in German is almost ready, thanks to Koelnticket, in particular Andreas Nebinger (thank you Andreas!). Let’s see a bit in detail how we dealt in general with internationalization issues in Teamwork; actually this set of problems will have to be met by any sufficiently powerful web application.
There are many senses in which an application might be said to “support multi-languages”, or be “internationalized”:
Interface. Labels and messages of the web interface are available in several languages. Teamwork contains a label editor, where you can create a new language and also modify existing labels. Teamwork is used in 43 countries, almost all using it in English; actually some project managers like to have it English as teams are made from people from different countries, so it encourages communication.
But as usual Teamwork does more: it lets you change labels on the fly in the web interface, saving them on the database so that you don’t lose customizations on application update.
Data. Data inserted in the application can be inserted in any language. We have been careful about the encoding (always a problem in web applications), so that the full spectrum of UTF-8 supported languages is included, which means also Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese… . This also assumes that the database on which Teamwork is running supports Unicode or UTF-8 data. THen you have the further problem that labels and data you have on the interface may need to be channeled on a different mean, e.g. exported in an Excel file, or in a PDF, and there again you may be plagued by encoding problems.
Search. (This is often forgotten) Full-text search requires multi-language stemming of contents: this is from our technical contribution, which is in the context of Hibernate (an object/relational tool) and Lucene (an indexing engine):
You need to know the language in which a document is written, in order to correctly index it; once you know the language, you can instantiate say the Snowball analyzer with the correct language stemmer. To make a practical system, you will need to guess the documents language from its content. We have found a very simple and effective solution [...].
In order to make a content “findable” also when searching from a language (say, German) a document in another language (say, English), we actually double indexed the content field, once with the nowball analyzer and once with the simple StopAnalyzer; so that if you are searching from German and you search “Telefunken”, which stemmed would be searched as “Telefunk”, will find also “Telefunken” in English documents ? .
See http://twproject.blogspot.com/2007/11/using-hibernate-search-with-complex.html and http://www.hibernate.org/432.html
So Teamwork’s full text search is language-aware. Actually search in Teamwork is much smarter than that, but this is a topic for another post.
Documentation. Documentation may be provided in several languages. In Teamwork’s case, as it is by now in 99% of the web applications, it is provided only in English. We also believe that it will be the “power user” of the application that will mostly need documentation, and we assume that she/he can read English.
So how can we evaluate Teamwork w.r.t. all these aspects?
| Feature | How it is dealt with in Teamwork |
| Interface | Available in English and Italian. German is almost ready, Spanish is planned. |
| Data | Data in all languages is supported (UTF-8 supported). |
| Search | Stemming is available for all Lucene analyzers: Teamwork provides out of the box English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Finnish, but it is easy to include other Lucene extensions. |
| Documentation | This is provided only in English. |
A F.A.Q. on Teamwork’s site talks about changing labels: http://www.twproject.com/configurationFaq.page#conf5
Teamwork’s new blog!
Filed under: news, releases, webcast | Tags: teamworkWebcast
Leave a Comment 
Teamwork 4 new icon set
This blog is the continuation of this old one on Blogspot. As blogging has become an important mean of providing information and news on Teamwork and related methodologies and technologies, we moved the blog under Teamwork’s domain and began using a more powerful content manager (WordPress).
Now some of the more recent and relevant content from the old blog.
Teamwork 4 beta: Teamwork’s new release is available with free licenses for evaluation. The download links are:
Windows (94MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_windows.exe
Linux (97MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_unix.sh.bin
OSX (83MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_macos.dmg
Here is an evaluation license:
# BEGIN TW4 ACTIVATION KEY – COPY FROM HERE ON
custCode=TW4BETAJAN12
expires=31/01/2009
licenses=20
enterprise=no
license=TGAP93VD211BEF2BEC79DAD1EF92WIBL059F7F0079732H5
# END ACTIVATION KEY – END COPY
What’s new:
- contains upgrade from version 3 (to be tested – do not upgrade production, only copies)
- a beta of a German translation
- fixed severe bug in working days “pushing” dates on tasks
- several minor bug fixes
Free licenses: we give free Teamwork 4 user licenses for reviewers.
From now on we will be giving out a free, non expiring 3-user Teamwork 4 license (worth 285 Euro) to any journalist/blogger who writes a public review of Teamwork 4 (typically a blog entry) regardless whether it is positive or not. In fact we’ll give you the license before you write the review: just send us a short blurb and we’ll send you the license.
Same if you are willing to do a demo of Teamwork 4 to an audience at a public event.
Free upgrades: everyone who bougth teamwork 3 after September 1st, 2008, will get a free upgrade to version 4.
Teamwork webcasts: the first of Teamwork webcast series is on line, and can be seen on Vimeo in high definition.It deals with Business processes integration.
This is the first of a series of webcasts in which Silvia Chelazzi and Pietro Polsinelli (two Teamwork developers) will talk about Teamwork, work and project management, and related tools and technologies. We plan to release a webcast about every two weeks. Notes on the first webcast are here, on the old blog.
