P.S. Published an update expansion on July 19 (2010).

Every time we got in a company with our software, we had planned to show how the software worked, how to optimize its configuration, how to integrate it with existing software. But we actually did so in the last moment of our visit, if ever.

But when we got in we always ended up in meetings after meetings where the topic was not specifics of Teamwork, but questions of work management, and how to best “map and structure” these, so that project trees, sets of issues, workflows and so on could be used in a coherent matter.

And we’ve learned a lot about which mappings work, and which not.

This need for conceptual mappings is teaching something, that is, where is the real value for the customers, what users need.

We progressively realized that the value of software like Teamwork can be simply in the introduction of more structuring, more quality in work. This can be much more than actually using the software – taking it to the extreme, one could simply read this guide, reform practices in the company and forget about the software

And more people and companies we met, more we appreciated the way we had structured Teamwork from the very beginning to be very, very flexible. A group of fashion designers, a company doing production, a team of software developers, an IT group, hardware engineers, event organizers, all these have different needs. And these groups may be in the same company, and different models need to co-exist.

Meeting diverse needs made Teamwork evolve so that it is an even more powerful mapping tool. Though it is extended, it still is an organically integrated tool.

Modeling company needs for organizing work always implies going beyond the scope of a single application: Teamwork is always used in an applicative context, and so its openness to external integrations is something that in our concrete experience has made a successful adoption possible.

In the user guide for version 4.5 you find also some of our experiences of “map and structure”, some gained by “boot camps” in companies, some by giving web support. You also find the definitions of some concepts related to work management that are not directly linked to software usage.

Some say that all companies need is a to-do list; this is for us just a symptom of scarce experience in what people do at work, of how complex are the needs of a productive company. We hope that the new guide can be of help in understanding which map best fits your organization.

Some of the stories titles:

How do I begin project management?
Managing with lists vs. managing with trees
Overcoming opposition
A critical moment: change
Migrations
Public projects
A design & production company
To Gantt or not to Gantt
Social tools for work management
iPhones for all
A distributed research group
Agile methods
Working by “pomodoros”
Kanban like management
Simplistic cost/benefit evaluations of organizational tools adoption
Worklog validation
Deep IT integration
Work management and games
How Teamwork is made with Teamwork
Teamwork and multilinguism
Business processes
Help desks
Company structure
Different Teamworks, same data bucket
Teamwork and your company’s worth

A few features included: custom pages can be disabled, possibility to speed up the “my assignments” web part.

The release includes also some bugfixes:

- fix in task list search when you search for code and name
- better logging for scheduler exceptions
- faster task print list
- fixed a rare key incompatibility with certain versions of MySQL
- custom pages can be disabled
- safer schema update procedure

You can download this release here. It is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. This release does not include database schema changes.

In order to simplify evaluation and deployment, we have prepared a complete Vmware image – for both 64bit and 32bit servers – which you can download and use as Teamwork server. It runs a Debian operating system with Apache Tomcat and includes a pre-configured PostgreSQL instance.

In order to use Teamwork, you just have to launch the VM and point the browsers to it – no config needed. The only configuration step we suggest to do as soon as your image is running is inserting the free 30 days demo license.

The VM’s download and instructions page is here.

Teamwork today is a stable, well known and widely used application – its sales getting better every month. We are always improving it and searching for new ways to make it better. The feedback given by users through the feedback service and the answers Q&A gives us a lot of ideas.

But people’s way of work change evolve all the time. With software we should try to foresee changes, and in the case of structuring work, be compatible with new ways of working. Now, project and work management is a field where there is a lot of competing software, and new solutions are created quite often. So in the last weeks I checked competitors for new ideas and evolution that would cover the recent trends in ways of working, like for example having the browser as the “operating system” where more and more applications operate, and so in many organizations a considerable amount of activity is on applications in the browser. Yes, of course Teamwork is web based, but one can do much more than that today. New ways of working need new ideas, sometimes radically new ones. Is anyone proposing different models, or reacting to new working ways?

Well, to my surprise, no. The same mistakes are simply repeated, again and again, like trying to “trap” user communication flows and other user usages in the project / work management software; development is done under wrong beliefs like “using e-mail is wrong, and users should be ‘educated’ to centralized communication systems”. Such tasks are destined to fail: it is simply assumed that users will happily and daily spend a considerable and growing amount of time on your specialized project / work management application because of their stakanovistic dedication to organization, which is the opposite of what is happening: people use more and more different, specialized applications for their tasks, and dislike and refuse single, centralized “monster apps” which attempt to replace all others.

In my review of “solutions” I’ve even seen a specific content manager connected to a popular issue tracking system that offers users a blogging platform. Now, how likely is that? How happy will employees be of being forced to blog in that corner of the bizarre issue tracking software instead of using their preferred blogging platform? This kind of ideas just don’t make sense: you have to improve work management without directly impacting software usage, and without trying to replace high quality specialized solutions with centralized (low quality) ones.

We have learned a minimalistic, relational approach and deposited it in Teamwork years ago. Now what about going beyond that? Well, no concept evolution is happening in direct competitors.

So in my search, I ended looking at personal productivity software, after seeing this nice presentation by Scott Hanselman, and there indeed there are some original ideas; consider for example Evernote ©.

The high level of interactivity, openness to devices and compatibility with user habits of this application is striking. The aim of Evernote seems not as much managing work, as simply collecting notes for personal usage. But there is a lot of stuff to look and learn. And many users will start work management from a personal perspective, and then will try to propose it as a shared approach: I believe this is a path that currently lacks appropriate tool support. There is a divide between project / work management tools and personal productivity ones that should not be there. On one side project / work management tools still pursue the centralized application option, on the other the sharing features of personal productivity tools are weak.

So we decided to open an experimental platform where to try and test different approaches to managing work, in particular starting from the personal / to-do point of view. In the meantime, Teamwork will keep evolving and improving, eventually getting new features and improvements from this experimental platform. We will blog about our experiments here in the coming months. If you any suggestion to make, post it on the feedback service: thanks!

P.S. Teamwork release 4.4 should be out in a couple of weeks (a free upgrade to all users of version 4), and will introduce the notion of “public” project – keep in touch.

Open Lab and Teamwork are not associated with Evernote in any form.

Teamwork 4.3 multi-Gantt view.

A free upgrade release for all users of version 4.0-4.2, this release includes some major extensions of functionality; while there is no “revolution”, this kind of release makes your “Teamwork life” more comfortable. Several features requests from the feedback service have been fulfilled. Also the user guide has been updated.

Download this release here.

Multi-Gantt support

This was motivated by this request: “Manage graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects”. We then realized that all it needed was the filtering power of projects search together with a Gantt style visualization. So this is what we’ve done: we added an additioanl visualization of the search results. So for example you can see all your root open project closing in 2 weeks in a Gantt style view.

Also all the Gantt scales have been extended to 5 years.

Import from CSV – Bugzilla

Import of issues and resources from CSV files: issues get imported from the Bugzilla CSV export format, but of course in this way you can import from anything.

Collapsible project trees

Projects trees can be collapsed and there are options to keep them open by default etc. . This was this request; thanks to Halil for the first implementation.

More Twitter integrations

Twitter integration with any action and there is a new portlet for filtering tweets on any topic: see the user guide, section 8.3.3.

Little improvements

- All notifications have in the subject the task they refer to, if it exists (this request).
- Display log on descendants (this request).
- Balloons have no more the confusing Roman number.
- Use  darker gray on Gantt duration background – better prints.
- Search analysis worklog: make the field “action” larger.
- In resource list there is no more the bothering default filter by company.
- Snapshot of a task can be edited.
- Search analysis worklog: make the column “action” larger.
- Issue multi editor: if there is a task on the issue and you have an assignment on it, let the watch icon appear even if the issue is not assigned to you.
- Experimental: supporting SSL over LDAP (LDAPS)

Bug fixes

- Issues didn’t get indexed any more for full text search.
- Order in company news doesn’t work.
- Portlet news doesn’t show news ordered by order factor.
- Resource hourly cost sometimes gets set to zero.
- Meeting: drag&drop multi editor doesn’t work for the just inserted.
- The link to resource drawn by the smart combo if the resource is from another area on which you have no right you see the link but you get an error.
- Search of a string containing ” in issues looped the application.
- Sometimes the rollover menu opened in the wrong direction.
- If you change the allowed file storage roots, disable links to old locations.

Technical notes for upgrade

This release build is 11250; it contains no database schema changes for all users of 4.2.10080 and following. As it contains an issue full-text indexing fix, you should reindex your data: see 17.4 of the user guide.

Until now the powerful search filter, which lets you compose complex search criteria, gives as result a simple list of tasks. From 4.3 Teamwork will layout the results also in Gantt graphical style. In the picture below you see an example of it.

Gantt view for Teamwork task's list

In the example above I’ve searched all the active tasks opened after the first of June and with a progress over 50%. Simply picking the “view as Gantt” button I’ve changed the view modality in order to compare the filtered tasks in time.

This cross-project comparison in a unified view is practically impossible (in Microsoft Projects, insert as subprojects etc.) in file-based project management, it is easily accessible in Teamwork instead.

The result of the search will be shown in temporal interval which goes from the minimum start date to the maximum end date, in order to cover all the tasks filtered and to get a global timeline view. Also progress andmilestones are shown. Moreover this page includes the possibility to move in time and to change scale.

So we keep implementing requests from our feedback service: thanks for the ideas, keep voting there!

http://feedback.twproject.com/

Sending an issue to Twitter.

Forthcoming Teamwork 4.3 will include among many new features, a richer Twitter integration, extending the existing worklog import/export functionality.

In the picture on the left you see how you can use the tag field to send any issue to Twitter, similarly to delicious. So not only worklog can be sent back and forth between Twitter and Teamwork, but you can send specific issues and worklogs actions to your Twitter account, and also send sticky notes in copy to Twitter, eventually as Twitter answers (“@user”).

In the case of issues, to send the description to Twitter just add “@twitter” in the tags field.

Teamwork / Twitter integration.

In the issues’ worklog action, put the “@twitter” at the end of the action.

When sending a sticky, you can “CC it to Twitter, as in the picture. Notice that the checkbox “send to Twitter” will appear only if you have enabled Twitter in your user options.

In case you are sending the sticky to a user with Twitter set in options, it will be sent to their attention.

Actually the worklog action trick works anywhere you are writing actions, not only from the issue list, as shown above.

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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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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