Category: project management

Does Twproject use Twproject?

If someone would have asked me the most frequent question I get since I worked here at Twproject, I would answer without hesitation “Does Twproject use Twproject?” This is the most asked question by our customers and then of course “How do we use it?”

If I was a good marketer I should probably say:

“Yes, of course we use it, we have created a fantastic project management tool and we could not be able to find anything better out there!”

But you know that I am always honest with you so my real answer is:

“Yes, of course we use it, the most important rule in developing software is to eat your own dog food, if possible, and we are doing it every day”

Since the very beginning of Twproject development, we have used it internally to simply find the best answers to every day works problem and questions.

Twproject has born and developed to answers our own needs and at the same time the needs of thousands of company like ours.

Using it internally has helped us finding the most interesting ideas and of course tons of bugs 🙂

Now that Twproject is a well grown software we can actually say that use it internally also for managing our projects and here it comes the second most asked question “How do we use it?”

Here at Twproject we have several great people working in the design department, in the accounting one, we have the development team and the marketing one from which I belong.

Each of us use Twproject in a different way, and the great thing is that it works perfectly for all of us.

I have already written how to use Twproject for managing marketing strategies and this is mainly how I use it everyday so I though it could be interesting to find how one of our development guys use it, so I asked Roberto, our Twproject Lead architect.

Roberto manages the Twproject project with Twproject…. it’s our own tongue-twister 🙂

Roberto manages releases creating one task for each one of them, right now his working on Twproject 6.1, wow, I really said that? Twproject 6.1 is about to be released with some great new features so stay tuned!

“At the very beginning managing all features requests, bugs and ideas was really difficult, we were covered by ideas from our customers and from our self, moreover we had a lot of bugs to solve and excited customers that asked us a lot of customization”

Roberto and his team decided to organize all features and developments in different task releases (each of them under the main task called Twproject) creating a real road map of features and ideas for the future. In time, Roberto’s team has created great features like the Gantt editor (also released as javascript Gantt editor component on MIT license) with dependencies and critical path management, the great Twproject to-dos management with prioritization, personal order, gravity management, impact bar and scheduled to-dos notifications.

“Now managing Twproject road map is very easy, following a software product development is very easy with Twproject”

And here are his everyday Twproject tricks:

Collect all ideas, features and bugs in your current release

Use all Twproject classifications to insert your ideas, bugs and features in your current release, use Twproject issues for this kind of things. You can classify issues by tag or type and prioritize them with gravity to define an order of importance. Classifications can be refined during meeting with your team.

Give to the most important things a due date and let Twproject remind you of them

If you have things to do that you want not to forget about, just add a due date, in your Twproject home page you will always see all things requiring your attention.

Subscribe to all important events and cut out meetings

Twproject will notify you of all updates you have been subscribed, finally you will know exactly what your team is up to and you will reduce a lot of time spent in meetings.

Move forward to the next release

When you have closed some interesting features, bugs and you are ready to go out with your release, clone your task and bring to the new one all the open issues you have not closed yet. In Twproject every task can be a template for others! In this way all ideas and open bugs will follow you and you will never lose any of them again.

Record your time closing issues

Developers generally close a lot of issues in one day and every time you will do that Twproject will ask you “how much time did it takes?”, no better moment to record your worklog, no additional effort at the end of your day.

 

OL2016

I really hope that this post will be helpful to all of those searching for a project management tool for managing software products.

Follow our blog to read more case of study!

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Twproject security model: you are on a solid ground

Twproject security model has been designed and refined in years, and it’s now the most complete and safe model you could have.

Since we added a new permission in the latest release, dedicated to assignment expenses management, we decided to write a new post to explain in details how the Twproject security model works, and what you could expect when you start working with it:

What is a role?

In Twproject a role is a set of permissions, telling to the system what a user can do. We have 2 different kind of roles: a global one, giving you permissions on all entities in the system and one at project level, defining permissions on projects’ connected entities only.

The global role is assigned to a resource when you activate its login.

When, instead, you assign one of your colleagues (“resource”) on a task you have to specify a project role. In this way you will be sure that resources will see only what they are involved in.

For more details about how create and modify roles check our user guide here:

https://twproject.com/support/using-twproject/security/

Pre-loaded roles

When you first start using Twproject, no matter if you are on your  local machine or on our demo, you will have a pre-loaded set of roles and permissions.

This roles have been created and refined in years and fits 90% of cases, so you will probably not need to change them at all.

When you create your first assignment you will find these roles:

Project manager:  Can manage the entire project, for example can change dates, create subtasks, add todos and assign new resources.

Worker: Can insert worklog, manage issues and documents on the project .

Stakeholder and Customer: Can monitor the project without changing anything and add todos.

Choosing one of them, you will define the allowed operations for that resource on that task.

The main permissions involved in managing projects and resources are the following:

Resource read:  Allows to read resources. Used with the “assignment create” and without the “resource manage” permission, it lets you assign from your team only.

Resource manage: It allows to manage the work of all resources, and assign all of them if used with the “assignment create” permission(global role).

Task read: Allows to read tasks.

Task create: Allows to create tasks.

Task write: Allows to write tasks, for example change dates and status.

Assignment create, read, write: It allows you to create, read, and write assignments, the list of assignable resource depends if you have the “resource manage permission” or if you manage a team.

Worklog manage: Allows to manage worklog, approve it, bill it of resources  involved in the project.

Expenses manage: It allows you to manage the expenses of  resources involved in the project

ScreenShot022

Roles have several other permissions for managing costs, documents and much more but they are not the focus of this post. Checking the roles’ page you will see that we have a permission for almost every entity in the system,  making of Twproject the most flexible project management software.

The resource chart – manage your team

Another way to give permissions to a resource in Twproject is creating teams with the responsible person. When a resource is defined as the manager of the team he will be able to check his team allocation, active projects, inserted worklog, resource workload and so on.

This will be possible even if the manager is not assigned on the same task of his team, simply by creating the company structure in the resource section.

Who & What (real life examples)

We have a senior project manager that can assign all resources on his projects and a junior one that should assign only resources from its team

In this case you need two different roles: the senior will have the default permissions(resouce-manage on global role), the junior instead, will not have the “resource manage” permission, in this way he will be able to assign only the resource on his team (he is manager of).

In my company there is single person, not assigned on any task that check worklogs and assignment expenses and mark them as approved for billing, how can I manage this?

In this case you have to give an higher level role (security tab in resource editor) to this resource including the “worklog manage” and the “expense manage” permissions.

We have a pmo managing the workload of all our resources, he is not assigned on any task

Here you will need an higher level role (security tab in resource editor) including the “resource manage permission”, in this case the resource will be able to monitor and change the workload of all resources and their plan.

We want to always assign resources from our own team

Just create your resource chart according to your team structure and then remove from the project manager role the “resource management” permission.

 

Customizations:

As I said analyzing examples above, you may need to customize your roles to let Twproject fits your work habits, this can be easily done from the admin section where there is a dedicated page to roles where you can add and remove permissions.

When you do that always remember the mining of the different permissions as explained above.

Conclusion:

Twproject security model is really refined, it lets you manage permissions both, at company and task level easily, having everything under control. Having such a complex structure will ensure your that your resources will be allowed to see and manage only things they can actually work on.

For more details about Twproject security model check our user guide here:

https://twproject.com/support/using-twproject/security/

 

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The Most Effective Way to Solve Management Problem

When a company feels the need of introducing a project management software is probably because a deep change is happening. Time of changing introduce a feeling of uncertainty that often terrifying people. It is instead usually a great opportunity for a company to grow and improve methodologies and results.

When your work is well organized, working is easier and people are happier.
For this reason introducing a software for managing projects could be hard at an early stage but a great success once accepted and used by all the team.

We have been providing bootcamps for 10 years in order to help companies reducing the learning period, ensuring all teams that, having everything organized, will improve the life of all of them.

Twproject bootcamp is the opportunity to sit all around a table and simply discuss about how to work better, there are not so many opportunities for doing that right?

photo-1417816491410-d61e1546e539

This is exactly what we do and why we call it internally the company’s therapy 🙂 And we all need it because working better is chance we can’t waste.

When a team is all together a lot of hidden problems come to light and finally discussed and resolved, around Twproject’s bootcamp table every opinion counts and have to be discussed.

Even if every company has its own procedures an habits, problems are always very similar, a lot of resources overloaded that are not able to prove how many open tasks they have, project managers that do not have the right feeling about project progress, teams that are disconnected and use different tools for managing their work….

“Probably we are the most complected company you have ever seen” or

“We have to many interruptions to really have the correct feeling of our work load” or

“Our tasks are too complex to be estimated correctly”

These are just an example of all phrases we heard in our experience, and we can ensure you that they are very often the same. Bad habits are very similar, even in very different companies, but introducing a Project management software is the correct path to face them once and for all. Our bootcamp are the best opportunity to put all your doubts and problems on the table, discuss them and solve them.

Mapping companies’ habits into the software is the easiest part of the meeting, facing problems is the hardest part but also the most interesting and inspiring one. If you think that this change can happen without effort you got wrong, changing bad habits is a hard work to do and for this reason you have to start with a step by step plan. Set your goals, choose how you would like to work, which data you would like to collect, and work together with your team to meet those goals.

  • Fix a meeting with the team promoting this change
  • Discuss your goals, why did you choose to start using a project management software? Which is the immediate problem you want to solve?
  • Extend the meeting to the rest of the team exploring the software and which are the features really helpful for your company
  • Time for facing problems, let’s design some different internal projects, how we can improve the way you work?
  • Map the projects into the software, the happiness of having everything in one place only.

This is of course just an example of our boot camp’s road map, we never know the way it goes, the only thing we know for sure is that no matter how hard the transition is, it’s always worth.

Read more about Twproject bbotcamps.

View our services
One try is worth a million words.

New In Twproject: Conditional Custom Fields

Twproject is flexible, you know that right? It lets you create your own reports, forms, dashboard and from its very beginning it allows user to add custom fields on all main entities. During the years this great functionality has been improved, adding custom fields on every object, tasks, resources, worklogs, costs, issues. Now we give you even more. Custom fields can be now visible only on objects matching one or more characteristics that you specify while creating the new field. Great, isn’t it?

Now you can say Twproject to show a custom fields only in particular cases, let’s see an example of these conditional custom fields:

Below you see the syntax for adding a new field on the task editor: I’ve added a custom field asking for an external code that refers to my invoice system, I say to Twproject to show this field only on tasks of type “Course”.

ScreenShot139

Invoice id, 10, {visibleIf:'"Course".equals(obj.type.description)'}

The first part represent the name, the second the length of the field and the third one the condition.
And here it is:

ScreenShot138

This new great feature is available since Twproject 6.0.60015.  Custom Fields can be added on tasks, issues, resources, assignments, worklogs, expenses. budget and costs. For navigating the object’s reference and find how to write your condition you can just read here:

Read Twproject’s Object Reference and find how to write your condition.

Let’s check this new feature.

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6 Qualities Of Great Leaders – Infographic

In our experience with thousands of great companies, that we’ve met thanks to Twproject, we have analyzed so many teams at work, encountering always the same characteristics defining great leaders with successful and happy collaborators. Being a leader is not an easy job, you have to carefully balance humility, strength and integrity, being always steps ahead and empathetic with your team. This interesting infographic show 6 characteristics on how to be a great leader.

Have a Vision – Communication is a key point being a leader, a vision is not enough, you have to be able to describe it to your team in order to transform it into an executable plan. You need to anticipate problems embracing change. Read the following post if you want to know more about more about improving communication within teams.

Be Modest– being a great leader requires humility, you need to admit mistakes being open to criticism and ready for improvement.

Manage Emotions – Emotions lead a team like a leader, and for this reason you have to be able to manage them, in particularly yours, in order to always positively effect others.

Be Honest – Be always sincere to build lasting trust in your team.

Appreciate the journey – Show commitment to your team and stand by your ideas.The key to making things work, is hard work

Help Others – Helping your team growing will help your projects too, acting with generosity always affect positively your people.

We found this infographic really helpful, summarizing all main qualities you need to attain for being a great leader, read below for the full list of tips.

If you want to manage your projects efficiently and improve your team communication you can try Twproject, the best project management software that helps thousands of companies getting things done everyday!

 

Infographic courtesy of: Eliv8group

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Plan Your To-Dos with Twproject

Organizing work to-dos is probably the hardest part of self organization, we read every day so many articles about haw to stay organized managing time productively and creating effective to-do lists. Here at Twproject we face the same problem as you do, because we are developers, marketers, designers exactly like you. When we started redesigning Twproject 6 we sit around a table thinking about how to really solve this every day problem, how to really help people organizing their to-dos?

For this purpose we introduced 2 very effective tools, the to-do planner and the Kanban tool, but today I want to focus just on the first one: Twproject ToDo planner:

Let’s see what you can do with this amazing tool: first of all, at the top of the page you have a filter that gives you all the power to find and refine the list of selected to-dos. This is up to you, you can decide to organize your to-dos task by task, or all together, you may just want to see the most urgent ones, or the open ones, as I said, it depends on you. Twproject filters are really flexible and all filters can be saved and reused.

Your filtered to-dos will appear on the grid on the left, or in the box of the day in case you have already planned them for a specific day.

Now what you have to do is simply drag them to the day you want to schedule it.

Having your to-dos-planned will help you also keeping track of them, the impact bar will show you if you have expired to-dos, something that you should have done and that is still open.

This tool is helpful even more considering that you can then prioritize all the to-dos you have for a day.

The Twproject toDo planner is even more powerful because it can be used in a shared environment, so you can add more users to the list moving to-dos from one resource to another. This is very useful if you work in a smart team that shares thinks to be done.

Create your work list according to your tasks, plan your to-dos with Twproject planner staying always organized, prioritize them day by day, add comments, screenshots and get things done!

Convinced right? So just give Twproject a try!

Manage your projects and to do list in Twproject

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How Marketing Agencies Use Twproject

We have always defined Twproject as a flexible project management software and the reason why we do so is that there is not a sector where Twproject is not useful. Our project management software is used by thousands of companies all around the world meeting expectations of great project managers and their teams in almost any fields. Twproject project management software has a very intuitive interface that enables an efficient communication in the team, and a great set of features answering needs of all companies leaders.

Today we want to focus on how marketing agencies use Twproject, which are key features for these teams and why.

Project/Campaign

Twproject can be easily used for managing marketing campaign; every project you create has a start and an end date identifying your campaign period, milestones can be set at the beginning or during the marketing initiative according to goals you want to achieve. With Twproject you can set your goals and meet them. Every project can be structured in tasks as per your campaign strategy, tasks can be closed, paused according to your needs; checking progress in real time is the key to make your campaigns work.

Campaign strategies, ideas and resources

Once your project structure is created you are ready for brainstorming with your team about things to do, tools to use, social media to engage and Twproject is ready to help you. Every project has a discussion section where all team members can discuss, propose, approve ideas, encouraging creative thinking.

Twproject allows you to link every project to a to-do list. You can add here everything you need to remember, everything you need to do, and in the same place you can store useful links, images, videos, every resource helpful for your marketing campaign. Everything can be commented by the team, collaboration has never been so easy.

You can always stay in touch with your colleagues, arrange meetings with Twproject shared agendas and staying up to date with campaign progress.

Startup Stock Photos

Campaign report and achievement

Every information about your progress is stored and easily readable so that you can analyze your achievement and improve your future campaings. Twproject project/campaign can be cloned, so for the next campaign you just need to duplicate it and you are ready to go! Twproject includes complete reports for adjusting and changing future strategies.

And last but not least you can record all your time spent on every specific project, so that you will always be able to track your campaign costs.

Convinced right? So just give Twproject a try!

Try it now!

The never ending Twproject “war” with Microsoft Project

Through our customers and contacts we frequently get reminded about Microsoft Project© enduring existence.

Twproject was in fact first born as the limitation of Microsoft Project (it was 1999 🙂 ) were unsolvable by using the Microsoft Project API available at the time. And the two project management solutions are born to differ in their core philosophy – and they do. Web applications became possible at the time and Twproject development started, around 2002, and Twproject got developed as wed based and around the idea of making information gathering as easy as possible.

Why care about Microsoft Project then? The team that develops Twproject and the set of its customers are often large, even enterprise companies, and we have the experience and sensitivity to typical corporate problems of software and IT integration. In these contexts we are still frequently asked how Twproject and Microsoft Project compare as solutions for corporate customers, e.g.

I actually downloaded it and I am trying it on my localhost. I would love to hear though what advantages Twproject has over Microsoft Project Server. We are in the process of trying to decide. If you have a comparison white sheet I would be grateful.
Some information follows.

Twproject is web based (since 2001)

Twproject around 2002

Being web based then and today meant ubiquity, adaptiveness, flexibility, inclusiveness. This in our opinion is what Microsoft Project always lacked.

Microsoft almost made it (in 2014!) making a web version of Microsoft Project the reference one. Still if you check their user interface it tries to emulate desktop software, using an iconic language alien to the web.

Twproject is cost effective

Let’s consider costs:
is available for $58 per user, per month

Microsoft marketing in the referenced videos stress the simplicity of the price model, probably as an effort to distract from prices. Well Microsoft’s model is actually quite complex, price ranges from $33 to $58 (per user / month!) – and if you want to use the desktop client, prepare to pay $1556 for each client!

That is way more expensive than Twproject, which gives you a full user for less than $5 per month!

twproject-prices

Twproject is not Gantt centered 🙂

gantt-new

jQuery GanttIt is a bit funny to write this, because we released a free, open source amazingly popular JavaScript web based Gantt component :D, which is also part now of Twproject.

Twproject has a Gantt-like editor where we tried to get the advantages of the Gantt user interface model without adopting the unrealistic

(planned time = project effort)

equation which constitutes the core of the Gantt model.

Twproject focuses on real work done

While in the current version planning is fully supported, still the core of Twproject is collecting information about real work done.
So it collects multiple projects, allows temporary dis-alignment of dates and statuses, collects issues, to-dos, worklogs, does all it can to encourage users to insert information in the simplest, fastest possible way. Planning is supported, but Twproject works with and without planned work.

Twproject integrates with different IT structures

it-integration

Microsoft Project depends for everything on Share Point©, so including its collaborative aspects. it is strongly integrated with Microsoft Exchange©.

So you have to get the whole Microsoft package, like it or not, to adopt Microsoft Project. Meh.

Twproject instead is functionally and technologically widely compatible with different solutions and is built to be non-intrusive.
This is true for both the installed and the online version of Twproject.

For example, the installed version runs stand alone in Tomcat (a Java web server), and can run anywhere, supporting easy integration with say LDAP, single-sign on and directory services.

The on-line version comes as a dedicated server instance that comes with its own mail server for a dedicated notification email.

Twproject works fine without Microsoft Exchange©, simple connection with an SMTP and POP3 service gives you full e-mail integration.

Twproject has an “open” approach (even if is not open source, sources are available for our customers). It runs on every operating system and can use any database. It is available both on cloud on or customer premises. It is web based and you can use it with every “modern” browser. Twproject is a wise choice from the IT manager perspective because of its open data and infrastructure features, as IT infrastructure changes over time.

Twproject developers are people, easily reachable on-line

Twproject is built by a small, solid and very efficient company. Its developers are ready to give support on the solution; moreover complete sources are available for free for all customers. Twproject is structured to support customization, custom extensions, reports, wizards, complete custom forms, and export and import with other data sources.

We deployed and maintain many customized parts for our over 3000 customers, all compatible with Twproject main release and hence compatible with updates.

Conclusion

After 15 years, the divergence of the two products is still considerable. In the meantime, the road of the web as a platform for applications has become the main path for collaborative software. And the diversity and richness of IT environments has increased. So we believe there are ever more good reasons to pick a safe, compatible solution as Twproject instead of the closed Microsoft Project universe.

References

http://windowsitpro.com/office-365/microsoft-announces-project-lite-cloud-based-productivity-team-members

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=pstc&from=sharepermalink&VideoID=ebe00785-db66-44d6-8ed3-86eafa63c7e4

Twproject is not affiliated in any form with Microsoft. Microsoft Project, Microsoft Exchange Share Point may be Registered Trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

 

Usability of a product and flexibility of a custom solution? Enter JasperReports!

Starting with version 5.5, Twproject acquires a new powerful report capability, integrating JasperReports engine.

Two main requirements for project management tools are high usability and flexibility. The former in order to win users over the tool, the latter for the data analysis side. Twproject is a finished product, constantly refined with usability in mind, but it has the unique feature of also being open for independent data querying and reporting. Continue reading “Usability of a product and flexibility of a custom solution? Enter JasperReports!”

Eight project management problems in search of solutions

Project management problems and solutions

Handling teamwork by project management requires expertise, skills, experience and flexibility in time. In our fifteen years of development and support of Twproject, we have found some problem patterns that are repeatedly found in teamwork management, and we have hence created corresponding solution support in Twproject. Some of the problematic patterns found are:

  1. Too much information at once
  2. Communication slip-ups
  3. Compatible with a single methodology
  4. Productivity slumps
  5. Not enough resources to run bigger projects
  6. Different apps for different things
  7. Risk of unauthorized access
  8. Task changes difficult to track

Finding solutions with Twproject

 

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[av_iconlist_item title=’Too much information at once’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue83f’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-ego956′]
Twproject solves this by using  powerful filters and role based structures which allow users to focus only on what they are really involved in – filtering by topic and time.
[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Communication slip-ups’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue85f’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-cuf7be’]
E-mail notifications constantly interrupt you? Minimize the risk of productivity slumps keeping track of all your activity with Twproject. Communications is easy and collected in your tasks, reducing need for one-to-one communication by email and chats.
[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Compatible with a single methodology’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue8db’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-bjx196′]
Designed to adapt to your organization’s processes, Twproject supports different methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, XP or classic waterfall. Twproject is so flexible that it lets you map projects, tasks, issues to people and customers, in the way that better fits your needs.
[/av_iconlist_item]
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Twproject time tracking tool lets you insert (quickly!) and monitor time spent on tasks, so that managers can check tasks progress and users can assess their own productivity.
[/av_iconlist_item]
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Use Twproject interactive Gantt to split the work into sub-tasks with achievable aims, use Twproject to assess what is most time consuming (and react when necessary), use quick messages for ad hoc communication, and last but not least – let everybody work the way they want.

But what makes Twproject unique is that you can change project structures and assignments while production runs, without losing anything of the information introduced so far.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Different apps for different things’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue83e’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-581l6i’]Finally Twproject offers one login for one platform with tasks, issue tracking, time tracking, integrated agenda, shared documents and much more.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Risk of unauthorized access’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue824′ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-3lblsa’]Twproject fully customizable roles/permissions allow users to maintain control over sensitive areas. Role based on assignments let users have different rights for different tasks.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Task changes difficult to track’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue845′ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-26697e’]Twproject task progress is easy to track, statistics are always available, giving you an immediate perception of task health.[/av_iconlist_item]
[/av_iconlist]

Still in doubt? Well you can try yourself with a free demo.

Give Us a Try!

Enterprise Project Management – Twproject

You have great teams, we will help you making them happier. Twproject do not push you to use a methodology. No additional effort is required to use Twproject; you drive, we follow.

Twproject is a high-end project and work management tool. You have great teams, we will help you making them happier.

 

Twproject is built to adapt to your working methods and operative environment; it give you a full set of instruments to stay informed on project progress, budget, and scope creeps. Twproject facilitate work offering you the right place to “collect” information, store documents, take notes and whatever else run around a project without effort.

Be free

Twproject do not push you to use a methodology. You will be free to use a classic waterfall as well as a Agile or a Prince2 approach. No additional effort is required to use Twproject; you drive, we follow.

Above all, control

Complex projects, several teams, issues, budgets, milestones; how to keep everything under control? There is one answer only: collecting feedback, any kind of feedback (status changes, date changes, work done, issues opened, notes, discussions etc. ), from where things are done. This point is the crucial factor; only if you get actual information from the “base”, managers will have significant data to get the right decisions. This requires that your software need to be widely adopted. We spent several months to make Twproject UI nice and friendly, making it useful to every users profile. This is why Twproject has a very low “rejection” rate.

Security, not jails

Enterprises are complex; organizational charts, permissions, grants, delegations, bosses and customers. The refined security role based model covers any kind of requirements of access/visibility on projects; just assign resources on tasks and Twproject will do the rest. No effort is required to setup a security structure that fits your company needs. More than ten years of adoption success stories tell us that this it’s true!

You will be able to set access from a single sub-task to the complete project in few clicks. High security standard are used for data encryption, control access, enforce password policy, but do not duplicate you efforts if you have already setup your network security: Twproject uses your LDAP, Active directory, file servers, or DMS with one click. Read more about Twproject security here: https://twproject.com/support/security-faq/

 

Add, adapt and stretch

Every company has its own “mandatory oddities”: Twproject is built to extend the basic set of features by adding custom properties on task, issues, resources, costs and every main entity.

Users can make its dashboard “a la carte” adding its preferred widgets. Custom forms, wizards and reports will complete the set of feature Twproject  offers to fit enterprise’s needs.

More on Twproject flexibility here: https://twproject.com/support/customizations-faq/

Make your IT happy

Twproject runs everywhere. It is built on Java and run on all the most used servlet containers. “Compatibility” and “connectivity” are our keywords.

Twproject installs in minutes on every operating system. You can use your company’s preferred database. Twproject is the IT world’ preferred  product.

An easy data structure, API, schedulers, and connectors will allow you to let Twproject talk with your existing ERP, CRM and accounting systems.

Don’t have an IT or you want to spare upgrade and maintenance costs? Use our per-customer dedicated servers on Amazon cloud.

Ready to give Twproject a try?

Start you trial now
One try is worth a million words.

Twproject 5.5 release: project reporting, collapsible Gantt and more

Reporting, statistics, Gantt, security and much more

After less than one month from last release, here is a brand new Twproject version with exciting new features.

Reporting

Your project data are carefully collected and maintained by Twproject and this represents on of the most valuable aspect of Twproject adoption.
How can you extract your data and present it to your users? Actually Twproject has several pages with dynamic filtering capabilities that extract meaningful data, but a customizable reporting systems was missing…. until now!
On version 5.5 we have integrated Jasper Reports, one of most powerful reporting engine. Jasper reports add the capability to create your reports in minutes using an intuitive graphical editor.
Reports are integrated with the flexible Twproject security structure in an easy and practical way, without forcing users to write complex query and rules.

Here a screenshot from the report writer Jaspersoft Studio

Jasper Reports Editor

 

and a couple of reports

Jasper Custom Report: worklog by resourceJasper Custom Report: worklog by resource

Gantt

Thanks  to a contribution of “BestKen” to our open source jQuery Gantt editor (see jQuery Gantt editor – collapsible branches) this version includes a nice new feature, collapsible branches:

Collapsible Gantt

Collapsible Gantt

Statistics

On task data, there are more statistical information available: ideal trend, worklog aggregated, and worklog done

image

the visual comparison between trend and aggregation makes you get at a glance the project’s “health”.

This is the first step in introducing earned value management, that will be completed in one of the forthcoming releases.

 

Repository

In this version we introduced some new features related to security.

In Twproject you can upload files on tasks, issues, resources and so on. Uploaded files are indexed, for full-text searching, and then saved to a repository.  Now you can choose between three different kinds of storage: folder, encrypted folder or database.

image

In the first case uploaded files are copied as-is on a folder or network disk.

In the second case, files are encrypted using a AES key, and then saved on the same folder. File decryption is automatic when you need to access the file from Twproject, but the file itself remain encrypted on the repository. There are tools for generating AES keys and for encrypting existing files.

In the third case, files are stored on a database table as BLOB data.

Note: existing files will use its original type and will not be touched.

 

Security

  • We have introduced a seal for every document that allows you to send a link to a friend (even without having a Twproject user defined). This link will be valid for 24 hours only, so that the risk of “leaks” will be reduced. Moreover the seal keep your repository safer, making harder an url guessing attack.
  • Another minor security improvement has been introduced for the LDAP mixed authentication. This authentication modality is useful in companies where Twproject is used by internal and external users at the same time. Sometimes a large company uses the LDAP authentication to make the user’s life better, allowing a single login name and password for multiple systems (and also to have a single point for password policy management). Actually Twproject can be used not exclusively by internal users, but also by consultants or third party suppliers that are involved in projects but are not present in the LDAP server (for several good reason 🙂 ). In this case Twproject can use a fallback to its internal authentication using its internal database. Now we can force LDAP users to do not fallback; internal user MUST authenticate on LDAP, external ones will fallback.

Bugs fixed and little features:

  • full search on plan comments
  • search on agenda events using “a:…”
  • IE fix on large auto-sizing notes fields
  • fix for jdk 1.7 in some comparators
  • a stylish background, and smoother colors

 

Teamwork 5.1: Project trees and more

We just released Teamwork 5.1 (build 57001) here:

http://www.twproject.com/download.page

Contains a new view, task trees, and a subtle but important extension in functionality for “staff” selection.

This is a free upgrade for all users of version 5. There are no changes in the database structure with respect to version 5.

Task trees

Teamwork tree

Teamwork project actions Thanks to user feedback and direct experience in bootcamps, we added a tree view of tasks which is simpler to read and allows basic data editing. It has limited functionality with respect to the Gantt editor but it can be practical in many cases.

Staff & department management

We revised both the inner logic and the user interface of the resource department / group / staff theme. The modeling problem that we’ve frequently met recently for Teamwork used in large organizations is complex cases of delegation handling.

Now if you are manager of a department you can assign all those in the department (inclusive of sub departments) as now they are on your staff – without setting area-global permissions.

This makes it easier to model delegation in structures where a certain kind of project managers create work for other departments, without overriding that department resources assignments.

It can be useful in cases where you have a planning department distinct from the set of project managers that handle resource’s assignments. So the planning manager can assign tasks to a project manager that has no global company rights, but manages her own staff, i.e. the entire department she’s heading.

We also improved the use interface by removing the “staff” checkbox which made you filter resources by staff, having your staff members always as first rows in bold in combos.

Little improvements

– Gantt editor is now in full screen (relative to the browser).

– Date change and status changed request for feedbacks are active only on tasks not just created.

– See in the resource assignment part all assignments on open tasks, also those out of date scope.

Bug fixes

– Mobile module: got “undefined” when saving agenda events.

– When creating a new document file / folder selection from file storage did not work.

– Made “my open issues” and “my open severe issues” predefined filters behave similarly in task selection.

– Gantt editor: task descriptions inserted from that page were not saved.

– Fixed default language pick at startup and on options.

Teamwork 5: Gantt, planning, new design & more

Teamwork 5A major Teamwork release, Teamwork 5, is now available for download here:

http://www.twproject.com/download.page

In the same page you can generate a 15 day evaluation license. (inclusive of the mobile version)

Teamwork’s costs have not changed, all details:

http://www.twproject.com/licensing.page

The base cost is 90 Euro per non-expiring license, and the upgrade cost is 35 Euro (44$) per user.

See the introductory video and download the user guide here:

http://www.twproject.com/documentation.page

Teamwork hosting is now built entirely on Amazon dedicated servers E3 service – more information here.

Upgrading from Teamwork 4

The multi-platform installer includes an upgrader from version 4 which updates the web app and your data, but it cannot update Java’s JDK (see FAQ), you must do that by hand or do a new installation; Teamwork 5 needs Java JDK version 6 (or 7). In order to try version 5, the best way is to do a fresh installation.

If you own version 4, you’ll need to purchase an upgrade license for version 5, unless you bought Teamwork 4 after 1st of June 2012 (our invoice date is the purchase date) – in the latter case it is a free upgrade.

What’s new

Teamwork version 5 has a new user interface and several new functionalities. The work model is mostly unchanged from version 4.
Main new features:

– Introduced Gantt-like editor
Also supports dependencies between any two tasks, not just between brother tasks.
Teamwork Gantt

– Introduced issue planner /organizer:
Issue Planner

– Assignment enriched with assignment specific costs (expenses)

Cost on assignements

– Statistics graphs improved and extended

Teamwork Stats
A line graph on the task editor which shows total worklogs / issues done.

More

– Heuristics on project progress / state
– Date and number formats relative to user profile (on top of user interface language, which was always customizable)
– Denormalization to achieve speed
– Speed improved in general
– Conceptual simplification of planning and estimation and more fine grained tools
– Shorter click paths with layers
– Amazon S3 file storages
– Custom reports on all Teamwork sections
– Agenda and meeting completely redesigned
– Workgroups visibility / association with images
– Technical: libraries updated to Hibernate 4.
– Flow management has been extended:
o for example worklog estimated in the time assignment can be set. Also added attributes to workflow descriptions that allow setting duration of tasks and estimations of assignments.
o clone tasks can clone also the assignment for the business process
o when writing flows you can automate assignments by “instantiator” and project manager:
The classes to check are
com.twproject.task.process.InstantiatorSwimlaneAssignmentHandler
com.twproject.task.process.ScaleToBossAssignmentHandler

We also released Teamwork Gantt, a free online tool for creating Gantts, you find it here:
http://gantt.twproject.com/

Of course Gantts created online can be imported in Teamwork 5 – just go to projects and select “import from Teamwork Gantt”.

N.B. Complete Teamwork sources (under NDA) are available for free to all customers as always.

Teamwork 4.5 released: a major free upgrade

We are really happy to announce this major release update. As you may guess from the length of this announcement, this update will improve your Teamwork in almost every section, providing more modeling tools and functions. The web browsers’ enhanced capacities (in particular those of Firefox, Safari and Chrome) are used in depth to give users a better experience.

This is a free upgrade for all users of version 4. Get the installer / upgrader here: http://www.twproject.com/download.page

The main features of this release are:

– Issue managing by dragging – “kanban” like.

– History of issue assignee, status and task change (better help desk and issue scaling support).

– Customizable issue statuses.

– Better graph and agile / scrum handling.

– Cross links between tasks / issues / resources / agenda events / meetings / boards.

– In-place popup editors.

– Operator load computation has become much smarter.

– Greatly extended user guide with real case work “mappings” to Teamwork, and a new section on performance optimization.

Layout changes

Several pages that up to now were popup windows are now windows in place, which improves their usability: issue editor, custom forms, workgroup selector.

Several text areas now support internal links (e.g. T#MYCODE#), web links (http://www.twproject.com), smiley’s, absolute URLs to images.

New features

Issues.

Issue statuses – customizable. New issues statuses can be created. There is a page for managing issue statuses (which before version 4.5 were fixed):

clip_image002

And for every status not only its color, but most importantly its business logic behavior is determined from this editor:

clip_image004

Whether it should “behave” when asking user feedback as an open status, as close, whether it should ask for comments and / worklog when entering a status.

So typically if your status is something in which the issue enters at “end of life”, it should be marked “as close” and “ask for worklog” too should be enabled.

clip_image006

Issue change history. When changing a status, task or assignee on an issue, the editor will ask for a reason, and the change will be recorded on the issue. And in fact there is an additional tab on the issue editor, “history”.

Issue organizer “Kanban”. Issues can be now be organized in a completely visual way by dragging and dropping them: filter the issues in which you are interested in, and then select the “organizer” button.

clip_image008

clip_image010 Now you can also enable use of external codes on issues (admin -> default for projects).

Dashboards.

The usability of the “customize this page” function has been improved: all portlets are always visible:

clip_image012

And it’s easier to drag them in the dashboard. Moreover it is easier to access the general page / portlet disposition page: just click “all users”. clip_image014

There is a new additional starting page: help desk support.

Operator load and planning. This was the user request:

“refine the operator load showing the effective load taking in consideration worklog done. E.g: 100h estimated on 20 days, done 10h in 10 days the resting 10 day must have a load of 90h not 50h like now”

Also take care of unavailability.

Use the new operator load on plan, load by day, end wherever it is meaningful

Operator load textual: put worklog with totals and pink holydays. Use striped background

Advanced users

– The examples in the distribution and the documentation now cover also “custom wizards”: see section 14.4 Custom wizards of the user guide.

Minor improvements

– More kinds of documents are now full-text indexed; these are the extensions now supported:

“.txt”, “.rtf”, ”.log” “.pdf”. “.htm”, “.html”, “.zip”, “.war”, “.jar”, “.xls”, “.xlsx”, “.xltx”, “.xlsEmb”, “.doc”, “.docx”, “.dotx”, “.docEmb”, “.ppt”, “.pptx”, “mpp”, “mpx”, “.msg”, “.msgEmb”, “.vsd”, “.pub”.

Also custom fields are full-text indexed.

Here are several user requests fulfilled:

– “Add worklog approval monthly screen” -> We will add bulk status change in worklog search / analysis

– Expose issue id in editor and list.

– LDAP authentication cascades to system one.

– Develop a resource snapshot.

– Sort File Storage Document Listing.

– Make “add document content” in a rich text editor.

– Please put a link to a task on the agenda event : we actually did much more by having full internal links.

– Need to add subscription event for when a new version of a document is uploaded.

– Display agenda items in planByResource like in worklogWeek.

– Search for specific custom fields.

– You can have a customized help message in the “help” page, just add in the labels CUSTOMIZED_HELP_CONTACT.

clip_image016

– Notes on issues are on the main tab and self-resize.

– Issue assignee selector got simplified.

– Now you can create subtasks as sub-fluxes.

– Counters can now be reset and deleted.

– When changing a task on an issue, notify the new assignees.

– Since version 4.5 custom fields support also “typing” of data. E.g. “cost,20,java.lang.Double” will add a custom field of length 20 and type “double” (a floating point number).

– Holiday settings: now you have year-specific settings.

– In issue list you can now filter by task type.

– Resource print includes my assignments.

Bug fixes

– Check why in the assignment notification we add a link to the task even if the resource has not the rights to read task … .

– Meetings are not full-indexed.

– Index custom forms data.

– Create issue from task editor menu does not launch creation nor filters???

– Issue multi edit: bulk change gravity do not close actions clicking “close”.

– Fixed MIME for teamworkMenuPlusCss.jsp,

– Issue cloning did not raise events,

– Fixed various combo positions in bulk update screens in case of scroll.

– Summa is not saved on document link and file storage on tasks and resources.

– A fix for Oracle on Resources with no surname.

– An operator may change his own password even if cookies are enabled.

– Do not notify disabled users.

 

Technical points

– In order to optimize memory usage,

clip_image020

If you log as administrator and go to the label management section, open the “label rules” container (it is closed by default), and say if you want to have only English as language, type EN in the enabled languages field and select SAVE.

clip_image022

– Teamwork 4.5 is no more on quirks mode – we dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 – and pages are in HTML 5

Important for upgrades. Several JARS have been updated, added and removed. If they are present these JARs should be deleted by hand from WEB-INF/lib:

o commons-collections-2.1.1.jar

o commons-logging-1.0.4.jar

o poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar

o jcaptcha-all-1.0-RC3.jar

– Added -server configuration to the Java JVM distributed.

– If using HsqlDB you can make a dump of the current log by hand from system check instead of having to wait Teamwork restart:

clip_image024

Notes for updating to 4.5:

Any custom filter on issues will need to be redone as the issue statuses are a lookup field.

Unfortunately all document list attached to discussion points of meetings will be reset.

P.S. We’re building the beta of a new online service – called Licorize – a cocktail of Delicious bookmarking and light to-do management. If you’d like to beta-test it,  just send an e-mail to info@twproject.com with “Licorize” in the subject or body – we will soon give you access and also a year of free usage to your entire group.

Teamwork release 4.3 available for download

Teamwork 4.3 multi-Gantt view.
Teamwork 4.3 multi-Gantt view.

A free upgrade release for all users of version 4.0-4.2, this release includes some major extensions of functionality; while there is no “revolution”, this kind of release makes your “Teamwork life” more comfortable. Several features requests from the feedback service have been fulfilled. Also the user guide has been updated.

Download this release here.

Multi-Gantt support

This was motivated by this request: “Manage graphical Gantt-type overview of all projects”. We then realized that all it needed was the filtering power of projects search together with a Gantt style visualization. So this is what we’ve done: we added an additioanl visualization of the search results. So for example you can see all your root open project closing in 2 weeks in a Gantt style view.

Also all the Gantt scales have been extended to 5 years.

Import from CSV – Bugzilla

Import of issues and resources from CSV files: issues get imported from the Bugzilla CSV export format, but of course in this way you can import from anything.

Collapsible project trees

Projects trees can be collapsed and there are options to keep them open by default etc. . This was this request; thanks to Halil for the first implementation.

More Twitter integrations

Twitter integration with any action and there is a new portlet for filtering tweets on any topic: see the user guide, section 8.3.3.

Little improvements

– All notifications have in the subject the task they refer to, if it exists (this request).
– Display log on descendants (this request).
– Balloons have no more the confusing Roman number.
– Use  darker gray on Gantt duration background – better prints.
– Search analysis worklog: make the field “action” larger.
– In resource list there is no more the bothering default filter by company.
– Snapshot of a task can be edited.
– Search analysis worklog: make the column “action” larger.
– Issue multi editor: if there is a task on the issue and you have an assignment on it, let the watch icon appear even if the issue is not assigned to you.
– Experimental: supporting SSL over LDAP (LDAPS)

Bug fixes

– Issues didn’t get indexed any more for full text search.
– Order in company news doesn’t work.
– Portlet news doesn’t show news ordered by order factor.
– Resource hourly cost sometimes gets set to zero.
– Meeting: drag&drop multi editor doesn’t work for the just inserted.
– The link to resource drawn by the smart combo if the resource is from another area on which you have no right you see the link but you get an error.
– Search of a string containing ” in issues looped the application.
– Sometimes the rollover menu opened in the wrong direction.
– If you change the allowed file storage roots, disable links to old locations.

Technical notes for upgrade

This release build is 11250; it contains no database schema changes for all users of 4.2.10080 and following. As it contains an issue full-text indexing fix, you should reindex your data: see 17.4 of the user guide.

try darker gray on gantt duration background

What you get with Teamwork and what you don’t

featuresSome project management applications provide minimal functionality: just a Gantt drawer. Some, more groupware oriented, provide a vast spectrum, including e-mail and chatting. While developing Teamwork, we made several choices about what to include and what not. The choice for Teamwork has been guided by this simple princliple: include only what will not sharply conflict with acquired user habits, and will have a rich integration with the rest of the system.

Examples of what we did include:

– “boards”
– sticky notes
– to-dos
– a calendar

All these have a natural integration with project management, bringing together personal and team management. So we put them together in a unique, integrated solution; you don’t have to get three separated products from us to get this functionality.

Examples of what we didn’t include:

– e-mail client
– chat services
– file management

The three integrations above are probably used by most in standard ways, and happily too: you are not going to change those user habits with the new project management software; so the work we have and are doing is to integrate with the existing applications, as smoothly as possible.

Notice also that probably most users already have a calendar application, and others that may overlap with what we provided built-in, and for that we are working so hard in extending seamless integrability (most previous posts talk about this in fact).

Current and future developments

Wikipedia logo
Wikipedia logo

This is for the actual situation; but usage of the web is evolving all the time, and more integrations are now needed: in Teamwork we always assumed that the contents and documents related to projects and work which would not be articulated in tasks, issues and to-dos would be handled by other document management software, and then somehow connected to projects (say for example with file storages). But with wiki and blogs, content is more and more inserted directly online, and we should support this also inside Teamwork. One can currently do this by simply creating custom portlets connected to a Wiki service. But as with most of our solutions, we would like something organically integrated with the rest of Teamwork functionality; for example, content editing would naturally blend with exposure of Teamwork objects to REST and similar services, and in-place customizations of pages. So this is one of the (non trivial) directions we are now exploring.

If there is an organic integration that we are missing, just post it on our feedback service!

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