Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Preliminary vision statement open for discussion

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27: Re: Preliminary vision statement open for discussion (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 03/17/03 10:45 PM
Don,

I don't understand why the content in question doesn't derive from acs-event. The whole point of a service like acs-event is to generalize.

Can you give me an example where you wouldn't be better extending an event? I guess I just don't see it, and I hardly use CR, so I have no point of reference.

To me one of the biggest problems with calendar is that a cal-item can only be on one calendar. This makes it difficult to share an event with only certain people.

If acs-events has any downside it is that it is to flexible, it was modelled to allow arbitrary events with arbitrary start, stop times and durations. I think many people are scared by it. (not impling that you are, just in general). I still see people writing thier own events packages that don't use acs-events.

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28: Re: Preliminary vision statement open for discussion (response to 27)
Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on 03/18/03 12:22 AM
First: if you see a similar (probably half-finished) message to this floating around somewhere - ignore it. I did something (stupid?) and my half-finished message was gone - dunno where to ...

Anyway, with respect to competetive analysis, we could start here http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7349 and here http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7350. Although may be a little OT - see below for simpler examples.

Then, more than anything else, KISS!!! From the packages mentioned in articles I've worked with Primavera and MS-Project. Both are feature-loaden, but for most projects at least 50% is rarely if ever used and even doing simple things can be difficult.

PM tools are administrative tools, mainly to help you rembember what you otherwise would've forgotten, help you to reduce the mesh in your head, to confirm your gut-feel and to communicate that gut-feel to others. But that's just my view.

I'd say let first get the basics right:
- proper work breakdown structure
- simple scheduling of tasks within the wbs
- a risk/issue register
- proper support for interdependent projects (i.e. ability to have projects containing subprojects)
- links between timekeeping, holidayplanner & plan
- may be a GANTT or PERT chart
- sensible resourcemanagement, linked to timekeeping and wbs/schedule.
- some collaborating tools (e.g. shared filestorage, wiki, forum, ...)

That way you cover the basics pretty well, and more sophisticated things can always be added later as an add-on package. Especially if we go for the 'project repository approach'.

But why not post it as a question in alt.projectmgm and/or alt.comp.projectmanagement. Expect a lot of flaming/off-topic remarks (like 'why would you do that' and 'pm is not about the tools', etc.), but we might get some sense out of it.

Another source of information are of course related projects such as (note - I did not put those links here as 'this is how we should do it', most are actually terrible, just a peek at the competition):
http://www.achievo.org/ (I've used this before, and it's actually very usefull, bit limited though and not that easily enhanced)
http://www.dotproject.net/demo.php
http://www.ace-solution.com/demo.php
http://www.epiware.com/
http://udpviper.com/html/project.php?project=ipm
http://mrproject.codefactory.se/ (desktop (X) app, very simple but effective for simple projects)