Archive for July, 2009|Monthly archive page
What you get with Teamwork and what you don’t
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Some project management applications provide minimal functionality: just a Gantt drawer. Some, more groupware oriented, provide a vast spectrum, including e-mail and chatting. While developing Teamwork, we made several choices about what to include and what not. The choice for Teamwork has been guided by this simple princliple: include only what will not sharply conflict with acquired user habits, and will have a rich integration with the rest of the system.
Examples of what we did include:
- “boards”
- sticky notes
- to-dos
- a calendar
All these have a natural integration with project management, bringing together personal and team management. So we put them together in a unique, integrated solution; you don’t have to get three separated products from us to get this functionality.
Examples of what we didn’t include:
- e-mail client
- chat services
- file management
The three integrations above are probably used by most in standard ways, and happily too: you are not going to change those user habits with the new project management software; so the work we have and are doing is to integrate with the existing applications, as smoothly as possible.
Notice also that probably most users already have a calendar application, and others that may overlap with what we provided built-in, and for that we are working so hard in extending seamless integrability (most previous posts talk about this in fact).
Current and future developments
Wikipedia logo
This is for the actual situation; but usage of the web is evolving all the time, and more integrations are now needed: in Teamwork we always assumed that the contents and documents related to projects and work which would not be articulated in tasks, issues and to-dos would be handled by other document management software, and then somehow connected to projects (say for example with file storages). But with wiki and blogs, content is more and more inserted directly online, and we should support this also inside Teamwork. One can currently do this by simply creating custom portlets connected to a Wiki service. But as with most of our solutions, we would like something organically integrated with the rest of Teamwork functionality; for example, content editing would naturally blend with exposure of Teamwork objects to REST and similar services, and in-place customizations of pages. So this is one of the (non trivial) directions we are now exploring.
If there is an organic integration that we are missing, just post it on our feedback service!
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Teamwork release 4.2.10250
Synchronized iPhones
The main features of this release are:
- iPhone calendar synchronization: this is first presented in this blog post, and also documented in the user guide
- Active task filter on the task tree: this had many votes on the feedback service, so… we did it.
Download this release here; there are no schema changes from latest release. Technical note: the web.xml of the application will be updated.
Features
- Added an “export to Excel” functionality to the resource list
- Task’ copy process remembers your options
- No users found in LDAP: put link to import in the alert
- Do not filter resources as your own by default
Bugs fixed
- Fixed a subtle bug in the filter for this week “timesheet” (worklog week)
- Moving of tasks worked correctly but ended up in an empty editor
- Fixed a bug in importing users in LDAP from non Active Directory servers
- Meeting print not updated with duration: start and end still there!!!!
- You cannot select a file in the file storage which has an apex in the name
- Timesheet-> Worklog analysis: if you insert a tag and you search an error occurred
- Why in agendainIcal all spaces in the description are removed?
- Workgroup popup agenda: cannot remove stored filter
- Bug on IE on administration page appear a white container!!!!
- Fixes for ULM skin in issue editor
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Integrating Teamwork calendar with the iPhone
In theory, being Teamwork integrated with the iCal format, it has always been possible to sync it with the iPhone, just like with Outlook and Google calendars. But as often happens, things turn out to be more complex, in particular if one wants to get a not only working, but also a comfortable solution. So we added generation of “.ics” urls, and now on the beta of the forthcoming (next week) release, our internal iPhone fanatics have syched calendars with our internal Teamwork application, which of course is also exposed on the web, so that one can sync both on wireless intranet access and on the web.
So check out next week release, it will be a free upgrade as usual for all Teamwork 4 users; the online users will get it without any kind of effort 
Thanks to Federico Soldani, a new Teamwork employee, and some of our customers, for pushing for such integration.
Setting up a Teamwork calendar in an iPhone
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