Teamwork 4.4.0 available: public pages for tasks

Teamwork public task pageTeamwork 4.4.0 is released: download it here.

We often get requests from customers and evaluators to give access to some Teamwork data to someone who does not log in Teamwork; data like status, progress and open issues on a project . Before this release, to do this you had two options:

1. set the customer as an assignee and give them access to Teamwork with limited rights (which from a Project Management perspective is formally the right choice), or

2. you exported the project data in say a PDF and sent it to the customer

Both choices have their disadvantages: the first one, that you are giving access to a system of which the customer does not know anything about, and the second one is that you have to do the procedure by hand.

Hence in this release (4.4.0) we added a third option:

3. public project pages: for any project / task, a public page can be enabled which will be exposed at Teamwork’s address, will not require login, and will present selected information. It is a way to automate distribution of information always updated from Teamwork to people that do not access it.
The pages will be available at URL of the form

[http://your teamwork address]/project/[task id]

When enabling such pages, there are several options available; most are self explanatory, like “show issues” or “show costs”, but these two need some clarification:

– “enable add proposal”: if you enable this option, visitors to the page will be able to propose issues / features on such task: the proposal will be saved as an open, unassigned issue on the task.

– “ask key to access the page”: access to the page will be protected by a key which you define and will be requested on access.

In the picture above an example resulting page.

Another nice feature is the introduction of custom types on issues (six fields like in tasks)  and the refinement of those on tasks, that now support dimensioning. Full details are in the user guide, section 5.8.

Other new features

•    added custom prefix for Teamwork notification by e-mail
•    issue list export in Excel now exports also estimated duration, so you can esteem the load of any group of issues
•    new custom field management with filed size
•    added notification on change assignee on issue
•    check on issue editor remove tab notes as button submit
•    created a new line in notes when the issue change assignee
•    nicer browser history
•    older hits get removed from database
•    tested file storage with Drop Box works just fine
•    automated worklog entry question also for issues going from test to closed
•    updated Twitter import with latest Twitter4J API

Bugs

•    bug on first access with cookies in page size
•    fixed bug on priority color in portlet “My assignments” (wp_myAssignment.jsp)
•    check on issue editor remove tab notes as button submit
•    fixed bug on cookies
•    fixed bug on work load
•    fixed bug on bulk issue move operations of required fields
•    fixed bug on issue list drag and drop
•    false JS error message “element not…”

Update

The schema update will add six columns on issues (twk_issues) for the custom fields and the distributed web xml will add a filter for the public task pages.