OpenProject as project collaboration software for Deutsche Telekom

Introduction

We were looking for project collaboration software to support our diverse project teams. Existing software you normaly have in the office did not or not sufficiently cover all requirements from the project teams. Of course it is possible to track tasks with Excel and exchange documents via email for review. But always the same problems occur: What is the status of…? Which is the latest reviewed document version…? What changes have been done by whom…? How to do daily scrum meetings with a team located at different locations without a physical taskboard…? etc.
On the one hand we were looking for a tool with a wide set of functionalities, i.e. for project planning, task management, release management, documents management, wiki, scrum, and more, on the other hand we needed to fullfil highest requirements with regard to data security, privacy and accessibility to get an approval for the software from the corresponding places in the company.
In order to be flexible with future developments and requirements, e.g. for features, interfaces, security and accessibility, and also to avoid licensing costs, we decided to focus on open source software.

Starting with OpenProject

We started with a very small own installation in 2009. Back then, it was still Redmine. We just wanted to test the software as a pilot only for a few of our projects. We soon realized that the requirements of large organisations do not necessarily harmonize with the Redmine strategy. Luckily, quite a few developers forked and started to maintain an own core, OpenProject, taking more enterprise requirements into consideration. So we decided to follow this more enterprise-driven community which was a good bet.

OpenProject quickly made it’s way within our company. After the official approval of the employee representative committee, more and more projects started to use the software. Other projects were watching with interest and more sooner than later we had many new user for the software and with it many new requirements arising.

New functionalities for OpenProject

As an internationally operating company, we have quite strict requirements with regard to exchanging sensitive data. One big challenge was that we wanted to ensure a secure access to the platform also from outside the company’s intranet infrastructure to include external suppliers.
We built an infrastucture that differentiates from external and internal access. Within the intranet we included our internal authentification services so people could use their normal username/password. For external access we built a plugin for OpenProject which enables a two-factor authentication: After login with external credentials, one receives a token via sms or phone call. For this feature we used the SDK and the API from our collegues from Developer Garden. Thanks a lot for all the support we received.

Furthermore, we make use of the ability to develop different plugins to implement dedicated requirements for Telekom, e.g. higher password strength, limited views and filtering of personal information within OpenProject to avoid personal efficency control, accessibility mode, performance optimisations and much more. Some of these new functionalities directly went back to OpenProject and its community.

Member of the OPF

We were not the only company who experienced these challenges with the choice and introduction of open source collaboration software. Therefore, in October 2012 we decided to be a founding member of the OpenProject Foundation together with other companies and developers to actively support and steer the development and the governance of the product and the community.
The mission of the OPF is to build and support outstanding open source project collaboration software and also have an active and open-minded developer community. It gave us the opportunity to exchange experiences, requirements and best practices with other organisations.

Continuing success

Today we use OpenProject for a multitude of different projects. By now, we have more than 2000 projects. Many use it to support general team collaboration and product development: For managing requirements, tasks, bugs; supporting (separated) Scrum teams, exchanging documents or other project information. Since our teams are often located at different locations or working with external suppliers, they highly benefit from one joint collaboration platform.
Additionally, we use OpenProject as release management software to track the releases of certain requirements on different system environments. This is a highly complex planning situation among our teams and OpenProject eases the collection and communication of this information to the different teams.

Now, as a member of the OPF, we always have the possibilities to give developments, bug fixes etc. right back into the core which let’s other companies benefit from and, of course, vice versa.

That’s the big benefit of open source!