Thanks for all your input, Ivan.
Do you have links to any of the products you've described?
Unfortunately, I've already started work on the project-manager, so a lot of the data model has already been completed. It is open to being changed, however.
I strongly agree with you that flexible hierarchies are extremely important. I'm trying to build this into project-manager, but I'd appreciate any insight into ways this could be improved.
Right now, I'm trying to get as much accomplished on this as possible by the end of August. So although my focus before now was on collecting information, right now, I'm focused on writing it.
However, I do want to make sure we're on the right track, and I'd welcome your help in whatever form you're able to give it.
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If you or anyone else is interested in keeping abreast of what's happening with the project manager, you can get email notifications on the project-manager to-do items and bugs from the bug-tracker:
https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/com/project-manager/
The current implementation of project-manager has a hierarchy both of projects and tasks, to arbitrary levels.
So tasks can be easily broken down into subtasks, and projects into subprojects. I aim to make it easy to move this hierarchy around, and see how it works.
The project-manager is built on the content repository, so it allows symlinks between objects (such as the tasks and projects), so potentially, a task could be part of multiple projects, for example. This may provide the interface you're describing, although I'm not familiar with the products you describe.
The trick is mostly going to be in the UI. Designing scalable interfaces for complex hierarchies, with thousands of projects and thousands of tasks is the challenge.
