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Added by Pete Redhair about 5 years ago
I have a few concerns and suggestions, as everyone regarding openproject, that i’d like to share and maybe get an opinion or insight from the openproject team .
Timelines
I’ve been using open project for,…,project management and use timelines with snipping tool to insert the project timeline into my project reports, it’s not ideal but has kept me away from Microsoft Project for this purpose.
Now i see that timelines view will be replaced with the new task/workpackage timeline view and will be discontinued in version 8.
Will there be a way to export a timeline so that it can be included in a project report ? is there another way to get the timeline into a project report document or presentation ?
Project status
in order to get the project status i had to create a single phase for all my projects and have all the phases and all work packages depend on it. Now when i select this phase i get the project completion percentage, however i think this should be available on the project overview page together with a star date, end date, estimated time, spent time.
Just a suggestion that i think would be very useful.
Resource Planning
like any project manager we need to allocate resources and to know when a required resource is available
In my open project installation i have several projects spanning throughout the year but like everywhere dynamic place there are some projects that arrive unexpectedly and i need to replan based on priority and resource availability.
Is there a way to see if a project can be executed on a time frame or search for a time frame when a certain resource available ? or see the allocation of a resource on a specified time frame ?
Enterprise edition
Perhaps for enterprise edition you could make available a costumizable project report document in pdf and also a budget report.
Replies (4)
Hi Pete,
thanks a lot for your thoughts on OpenProject. We are happy about your feedback.
Timelines
Many users request the feature to export the timeline to PDF.
In OpenProject we will work a lot on significant improvements of the timeline module. However we will not be able to work on this feature. We are still searching for a sponsor for this feature.
Project status
Yes, you are absolutely right. The project lacks attributes such as
Adding these attributes is easy. However this feature is only fun if you can generate reports such as project status dashboards. I am thinking of integrating project status information with the work packages list and timelines view. So we could get reports such as “Show me all project with project status red that have a Go-Live date in Q3”. It makes the view even more complex and we are not sure if it is worth it. Alternatively we could replace the current project list with the project list from the administration. But we didn’t make a decision yet.
Resource planning
I totally agree. This would be a great feature. We are still searching for a sponsor for this.
Enterprise Edition
Currently a lot of companies sign up for the Enterprise Edition. This gives us more resources to work on the requested project reports. So signing up for the Enterprise Edition is the best way to support the open source development.
All the best
Niels
Thank you very much for your reply.
just a few complementary notes and opinion regarding the subjects mentioned:
Timelines
Since there is no PDF export and timelines is scheduled to disappear in v8 it would be nice to still be abble to view timelines in full screen while the export feature doesn’t find a sponsor.
Althought not a very professional presentation it would allow for clipping the image, if i can’t even get that out of there then there is no use in doing the planning, all projects require presentation to the sponsor.
Project status
The mentioned attributes would be of great use even without the dashboard so if it’s easy to implemment then it would be a great improvement to have it.
In my opinion the most important ones are:
In my opinion the query/filter you mentioned should be considered a separate feature as the dashboard should also be another feature and the same for a full project report exported to PDF or other report or presentation format.
Regarding replacing the format of the present v7 project list with one similar to project list from the administration it would be an improvement. If my opinion can help you decide count it on the “change it” column.
It’s just more readable requiring less scrolling, it’s just a matter of readability.
Resource Planning
Hope one sponsor is found quickly it’s an important feature.
Planning and allocating resources to a project without having an allocation map to see when the resource is available (or overallocated) to find a time frame where a new project has the required persons/resources available requires the use of other tools like the popular MSProject or spreasheets or other aplications making you use and support several tools, and eventually in some cases, opting to do it all in one of those other tools.
Best Regards
Pete
I assume nothing new on the topic? My company is going to perform a big infastructure update and a migration to OpenProject could be possible.
Niels Lindenthal wrote:
Is there something estimated? Probably that could be funded by multiple intrested companies? We are kind of really small, so sponsor it in total could be a problem. Probably funding it in the kickstarter way could be an option (like for the qutebrowser).
Tom
We are missing this as well