More questions? More Answers!
Today we put online a new support and Q&A’s site for Teamwork. Here it is:
During this year we focused on improving communication with the Teamwork’s community, by getting more and more contributions from our customers and testers; for this reason we have tried to improve the way people can give us feedback.
UserVoice has been the first service that we have put online to collect your ideas and suggestions for new Teamwork releases. This service has had a great success.
Following this line we have worked to provide our customers a more and more comfortable way for getting support; after considering different hypotheses, we chose the Q&A service above because it is very user friendly and responsive.
The new support service, which uses the same engine as StackOverflow, the popular developer Q&A’s site, is very easy to use and is provided to let you ask questions about Teamwork functionality and about work management in general, and get good quality answers.
So let’s go there and ask!
Everybody contributes!
One of the features appreciated by Teamwork users in contrast with other web applications for project management is that it is not exclusively oriented to technical users. For example, about 8% of Teamwork customers are software houses, and several of them migrated from bug-tracking oriented software to Teamwork, simply by realizing that there is more to software development than just bug tracking.
In order to facilitate usage and group contributions, a trick to enable issue add for everyone in the project area, even if not assigned to projects, is to simply extend the “operational” role, created by default by setup, with the “task read” and “issue create” permissions. 
This was suggested by Roberto and closes a feature request here.
Note: the logo on the left is the logo of our “error serving and collecting” new online service which will go in public beta soon: bugsvoice.com.
Teamwork release 4.3.11360
This patch release includes one major extension and one bugfix.
The major extension is the support for PostgreSQL, we have in fact corrected a known error in the Hibernate’s PostgreSQL dialect.
You can read here for more details about this issue.
Bug fix: error in issue multi-line editor, adding a new assignee for the task of the issue.
Download this release here; there are no schema changes from latest release.
Teamwork release 4.3 available for download
Filed under: IT integration, issue tracking, news, project management, releases, time recording, work logging, usability | Tags: multi Gantt
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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.
| try darker gray on gantt duration background |
New multi Gantt support
Filed under: IT integration, project management | Tags: multi gantt view
Comments (1) Forthcoming Teamwork 4.3 release will support a way of “managing a graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects“, actually, more than this: simply any filter on the project list can be seen in a Gantt-like way, and also printed. The need for this new implementation was suggested on our feedback service and got many votes from our users.
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!
More Teamwork – Twitter integrations
Filed under: IT integration, issue tracking, time recording, work logging | Tags: twitter integration
Comments (1) 
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.
Teamwork webinars
Teamwork webinars now available
We have just activated the possibility of delivering webinars to customers to remotely supply instruction from our instructors. This is at a fraction of the cost of a bootcamp, and may be all you need. Details can be found here:
Open Lab’s new blog
Open Lab, the software house producing Teamwork, has a new blog here: http://blog.open-lab.com, on the first post we explain the significative positive evolution that we are going through.
“Adding a wiki” to Teamwork
The meaning of “adding a Wiki”
The most voted request on our feedback service is “Integrate a wiki in the dashboards”:
I think that what actually users mean is “integrate Wiki functionalities in Teamwork”, but this is one of the requests that can be interpreted in several different ways: it probably implies a feature set, and some of such features make sense for the Teamwork context, and some may not.
Some example features:
- Let any user have a portlet on her home page that is actually the home of a company Wiki
- Let people edit any Teamwork page layout of in a Wiki way
- Have for any object a history of changes on that object
- Use Wiki syntax for any content
- Pages are created by just creating links to them
A different, more radical interpretation could be “change completely the management philosophy and let there be no user rights and pages and contents be just contributed by users”. In fact there are even applications for issue management that actually are just a wiki. Well now, I think that it may be useful to try to clarify what is the usefulness of work management software. It must be something that makes you work better; it’s quick to insert the essential work data, and that done, it does a lot of work for you. Inserting work data in a Wiki just doesn’t give any specific support. A Wiki is meant as a tool to manage a documentation body contributed by several people; that is just not what work management is about; and using the wrong software for the just, will just increase confusion in your company, make people frustrated and make them waste more time. Wrong software, sorry.
Implementing a Wiki engine
This does not mean that the Wiki’s logic can’t inspire some really good ideas that can be included in any kind of software. This is the perspective that we’ve taken on the “Wiki integration” subject, and there are many subtle problems involved, like:
- If you want to write contents with links to objects, it would be nice to have a RESTful API in Teamwork in order to write links simply
- Should we use the TinyMCE editing which we started using in some places (and users are pushing for more), or switch to Wiki syntax in contents?
- Up to today documents are typically linked in Teamwork, but contents lives outside (and this is generally a wise choice), but with this extension it should become really nice to write contents in Teamwork for specific projects
Given the deep integration of the Wiki features and Teamwork’s, we are building our own Wiki engine; its persistence is Hibernate based, and there is none available that does that, so this may become of general interest.
One of the considerations that convinced us to write it from scratch is that several Wiki applications functionalities are already available in Teamwork, often more refined than those built in Wikis. Like full text search, subscriptions and e-mail integrations and recent pages.
If you’d like to suggest some particular feature of the Wiki integration, you can post it on the feedback service (yes, we do check it out).
What you get with Teamwork and what you don’t
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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