Forum OpenACS Development: ANN: dotWRK developments

Collapse
Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on

All,

Recently I've started to organize/refurbish the project around the dotWRK initiative.

Details can be found at the projectpage

At the moment the project is being shaped and the current focus is on

  • putting together a core team that will lead further development
  • coming up with a requirements document, which can be the basis for mentioned development

So I'd say - have a look at the projectpage and 'drop by' if you're interested in contributing.

Best regards,
Jeroen van Dongen

Collapse
Posted by Nick Carroll on
Hi Jeroen,

I've just started a Masters degree at the University of Sydney, where my focus of research will be on a project management system that I will design and develop.  I had intended on developing a project management package for OpenACS, which can be integrated into dotWRK when it is finally released.

I would like to be a member of the core development team, but with a strong focus on project management.  I am currently working on a project specification document that I would like to release to the community for comments, when I am close to completing it.  Again this document will focus on a project management package, and will not be considered as a specification document for dotWRK, which I believe is to be an intranet application.

Cheers,
Nick Carroll.

Collapse
Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on
Nick,

Great to hear. From the various mails I've received so far (I'll publish intermediate results over the weekend) I get very much the impression that there is a great deal of interest in having a set of project mgmt tools for oacs, and some that would fit in with a dotWRK-a-like environment more in particular.

Eager to see more!

Rgds,
Jeroen

Collapse
Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Hi Nick,

Aristoi (a new OACS/dotLRN/dotWRK company) just launched a OACS based "Project Portfolio Management" website for a corporate client. The project involves managing lots of repeative tasks performed at different locations (stores) on different dates.

We'd be happy to share what we've done, learned and the problems we've run into with you and others working on dotWRK.

Collapse
Posted by Håkan Ståby on
Hi Jeroen,

I would like to join you as well on the core team. I have some experience in collaboration portals both technically and what customers require from a project application.

I am really looking forward to this! :)

Cheers,
Håkan

Collapse
Posted by Jade Rubick on
Hi Jeroen,

I wrote you privately earlier, but maybe I'll post again so people have an idea of what's happening with dotWRK.

The company I'm working at has a strong interest in project management, so I'm very willing to help out with the project management piece.

I don't have a lot of experience with project management software, however, so I'd like to do some background reading to get up to speed. Any recommendations on what to read, and software to look at?

Also, Nick, if you're just starting your masters, I imagine your deadline for writing this is going to be in another year or two, right? I wonder if that might need to be dotWRK project management 2.0

Other pieces we're going to be very interested in are:

* A generic collaborative todo list (like the ticket tracker, but generic enough that it could be used by any employee). Our company has come to use this fairly heavily.
* upgrading from ACS 3.4. I'm slowly going through the process of porting from ACS 3.4 Oracle to OpenACS Postgres. I'll make available any scripts that seems useful to others.
* A Wiki -- I believe this could be very useful in our company.

My background is in human computer interaction and corporate intranets.

Collapse
Posted by Peter Marklund on
Jade,
I think that for the todo-list application the new workflow-based and generalized Bug Tracker is a strong candidate. Lars has made the new Bug Tracker so customizable that it can very well function as a Ticket Tracker / Task Manager. In particular, versions and patches can be disabled, the pretty name of bugs can be set to tickets (or tasks or anything else), and tickets can be categorized along arbitrary dimensions.

The new Bug Tracker also uses the content repository so that adding search should be straight forward. This also means that the datamodel supports versioning of tickets.

Collapse
Posted by Michael Steigman on
Hi Jeroen,

Count me in as well. This is an area I'm really interested in and also relates to my day job ( more time to hack :). I'm very interested in the project management piece. I also hope to start working soon on a proposal development system for our organization which may work well as a dotWRK component. I'll help anywhere help's needed, though.

Michael

Collapse
Posted by Simon Carstensen on
I am currently working on a project with Janine from furfly that is essentially a first draft of dotWRK. Now that Jeroen seems to be kick-starting things, I thought we might as well coordinate our project with the community.

There hasn't been written any code yet, since we've until now been waiting for the release of dotLRN 1.0 and Collaboraid's new bugtracker code.

First, the vision statement: we're working on what is going to be a site each of furfly's clients and contractors can go to.  For clients, they will be able to  report and check on bugs, ask questions in a forum, and see furfly news items.  For internal people we will have our own technical discussions,  status reports, hour reporting, and task lists.  There may be other things we can do with this as well;  We're open to ideas.

Here's our project definition, which might be a possible step-by-step plan to build on?

The steps:

* finish the bugtracker portlet written by Janine.  This includes tweaking it to make it work with the new bugtracker (the bugtracker portlet hasn't been touched for months), and it will include discussing proper design for various types of users at openacs.org.

* figure out whether dotLRN allows you to specify the default configuration for a class/community (that is, what portlets it is  created with).  If it doesn't, it probably should and we should add  this functionality unless TAB turns it down for some reason

* configure labels set up terms/depts/subjects etc so that we end up  with class URLs something like this:

http://myfurfly.net/dotlrn/classes/internal/furfly/project-management/one-community?page_num=0

So what was Subject might now be called Project, for example.  The idea is to end up with a tree structure
(internal/furfly/project-management in the example above) that makes sense.  So we might have

internal/furfly/project-management
internal/furfly/furfly-website
external/simon/bcuni
external/NYR/nybooks
external/NYR/granta

Etc.  These are just examples;  We're totally open to other structure ideas here.  We could just use communities and ditch the whole  hierarchy thing except we do have at least one client with two sites and this helps make that clear.

Lars has informed me that Collaboraid is already working on loosing up the hierarchy of dotLRN a bit, so this step will need some coordination.

* create classes for each of our existing clients, plus furfly internal uses.  We'll figure out together what they should all be, when we get there.

Proposing the above as a first outline of a project definition for dotWRK, feel free to add to this list with ideas. If the community finds this a worthwhile agenda to build on, let's put on the project page.

I'll be working on the bugtracker portlet, but we should of course be sure to coordinate our efforts as much as possible.

/Simon

Collapse
Posted by Jade Rubick on
Simon, that link doesn't work for me. I don't have permissions on that section as just a registered user.
Collapse
Posted by Nick Carroll on
Hi Jade,

I have to complete my masters within two years, so I will be committed to this project for at least that amount of time.  My plan so far is to be involved in development for at least a year, and write it up within 6 months.

Jeroen mentioned that it is worth developing small packages of PM tools, rather than one monolithic package that does it all.  I totally agree, and the first package that I suggest working on for PM is a project management portfolio package.  The datamodel for this package will simply contain information about a bunch of projects.  I was planning to base the datamodel on the Project Management XML schema (PMXML http://xml.coverpages.org/projectManageSchema.html).  A couple of basic use cases would be:

1. Add a project.
2. Update project progress.
3. Close project.

The proposed project portfolio package will simply contain project data.  This will allow other packages, like a Gantt chart package to access the portfolio API, and display the data in a Gantt chart.

These are just some ideas that I am playing around with.

Cheers,
Nick.

Collapse
Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on
I started a new thread to discuss what dotWRK precisely should become, however I named it badly and it seems that you cannot revoke forum posts, so here is the link:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=86810
Collapse
Posted by Simon Carstensen on
I know. It was meant as an example of a possible tree structure that makes sense, something like:

internal/company/project-management
internal/company/company-website
external/client1/website
external/client2/website
...

/Simon

Collapse
Posted by Nick Carroll on
Hi Caroline,

Thanks for the heads up.  I'm slowly making progress on the design of the project repository datamodel.  Its based on PMXML (www.pmxml.com/xml), which is a data definition for project management systems.  It is already used in PM systems such as Primavera Systems, Welcom, eProject.com, Great Plains, and PlanView.  Following a standard would make data integration a lot easier for dotWRK.  Does everyone agree?  Or is there an opinion in favour of a more simplified data model as oppose to a complete representation of project data?

Cheers,
Nick.

Collapse
Posted by Jade Rubick on
Caroline, I think we'd all be very interested in what you've done. Is there a link to it?