Teamwork - Work Management Software - The Blog

Continuing on blog.twproject.com

2009-01-13T10:39:00.003+01:00

This blog will be continued on http://blog.twproject.com. This because this blog has become more and more important, as a source of news and information on Teamwork and work/project management. So we want a more powerful content manager (Wordpress), and have the blog on the main domain (twproject.com).

Thank you blogger for hosting us up to now!

Teamwork 4 new beta available

2009-01-12T16:34:00.004+01:00

You can now download and try Teamwork 4 beta. There is no user guide, but we are working on it and it will be released with the final, due this month (January 2009).

WARNING: Do not use the beta to upgrade your current Teamwork 3 installation. The upgrade procedure is not complete and not reversible. Of course it will be complete for Teamwork 4 final.

Get Teamwork 4 at the following links:

Windows (94MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_windows.exe
Linux (97MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_unix.sh.bin
OSX (83MB): http://dl.open-lab.com/Teamwork_4BETA_macos.dmg

Here is an evaluation license:

# BEGIN TW4 ACTIVATION KEY - COPY FROM HERE ON
custCode=TW4BETAJAN12
expires=31/01/2009
licenses=20
enterprise=no
license=TGAP93VD211BEF2BEC79DAD1EF92WIBL059F7F0079732H5
# END ACTIVATION KEY - END COPY

What's new:
- contains upgrade from version 3 (to be tested - do not upgrade production, only copies)
- a beta of a German translation
- fixed severe bug in working days "pushing" dates on tasks
- several minor bug fixes

Limitations of current beta:
- worklog analysis and move is broken
- resources search by login name does not work
- db2 installation is not supported

Filling timesheets from Twitter feeds and Subversion commits

2009-01-10T11:21:00.004+01:00

One of my dreams (and I believe, of many) is to somehow get time recording to be done easily from where I like to leave traces of my woring activity. Being a developer and a marketing man, my activity is recorded in Subversion commits and Twitter twits. Now from these there cannot be an automated filling of time sheets (it's not that simple), but it would be nice when filingl time to be somehow "surrounded" by your traces; well, now teamwork 4 does exactly that. Try it yourself here, using for example worklog day, or the worklog imports.

P.S. Teamwork does much more than that: you can link projects to SVN folders, export your worlogs to Twitter, ... .

Teamwork roadmap for 2009

2009-01-09T18:11:00.008+01:00

This is our roadmap for Teamwork for 2009, after a splendid 2008 of constant growth:

1. Release teamwork 4 (really close); you can already try the beta here.

2. Build a personal productivity application that will use Teamwork as a backoffice (yes, this is a new idea - we'll blog more on this in coming weeks).

3. Teamwork online service - make it better.

Do you want to use your project management software online or in an internal server? We, up to a few years ago, nobody would dream of using such an intimate service online. But things have changed,

99% of customers currently use Teamwork on a local installation. or on their host For the moment, Teamwork 4 beta can be used only in a local installation. A local installation gives you more control, but also more maintenance burden.

In fact, we currently openly discourage to use Teamwork online service other than for testing, and we redirect customers to their hosting services to get a "closer" installation; that because we are aware that our online service is not great; its about ok to give a try to Teamwork 3, but a local installation is better, faster, richer in features, and last but not least lets you play with integration with services.

We are aware that the software as a service model is getting really very popular; we'll revamp our online service after release of version 4. We are now (January 2009) totally focused in releasing version 4, mainly for your local installations.

So our suggestion is for the moment is try Teamwork will a local installation: the installation process now is really simple. But in 2009, you will also get a concrete, fast and reliable option to use it online on our servers: it is one of our targets.

We have more in mind, but already meeting these three targets won't be easy. So life keeps being interesting here!

Work management: different ways of working

2009-01-08T12:20:00.003+01:00

Everybody is different; and everybody wants to work differently. One of the problems when trying to organize work, maybe also by introducing a management tool, is that you have to find a way to meet different needs.

The low access level and absence of security checks of social tools is one of the reasons why they are easy to accept in a working team, but of course they have limitations which will emerge even after a short time.

An answer may seem be to adopt an application with a minimal set of features, so that everybody will agree on using those; but actually this is a way of temporarily hiding the problem, because work management involves a lot of kinds of different actions, and different people (production director, expense manager, those that get things done, ..) find different actions the essential ones, so everybody agrees that few features are essential, only everybody points to different ones.

So if you want to go towards a minimal agreed set of features, the best thing is not to use a specialized tool at all. Use just Excel and paper, you'll be fine.

Our approach with Teamwork is that if the software has to be useful at all, it has to be compatible with different ways of working. And in this, it is uniquely powerful: you can model projects as trees, as flat lists, as just a bunch of issues, as a business process or flow, ... . You can assign the same task to many people, or pick one task one person, or associate one task to many many issues, or just use to-dos and record all worklog on a single project, or whatever crazy way of working you prefer. You can record worklog on week time sheets, or by issue, or on a counter, of from Subversion commits, or from Twitter twits...
You can manage meetings from Teamwork's agenda, or from Outlook, or from Google calendar, or from any iCal client, and so on...

In the picture you see the world’s first working Difference Engine; it has nothing to do with the topic, but looks nice :-)

Free Teamwork 4 user licenses for reviewers

2009-01-05T15:08:00.007+01:00

From now on we will be giving out a free, non expiring 3-user Teamwork 4 license (worth 285 Euro) to any journalist/blogger who writes a public review of Teamwork 4 (typically a blog entry) regardless whether it is positive or not. In fact we'll give you the license before you write the review: just send us a short blurb and we'll send you the license.

Same if you are willing to do a demo of Teamwork 4 to an audience at a public event.

To get to try Teamwork 4, just see the post above.

Teamwork Webcast #1 - Business processes integration

2008-12-29T17:40:00.044+01:00

This is the first of a series of webcasts in which Silvia Chelazzi and Pietro Polsinelli (two Teamwork developers) will talk about Teamwork, work and project management, and related tools and technologies. We plan to release a webcast about every two weeks.

In this one after a brief table-tennis exchange (trying the latest addition to our office) we take a first look at Teamwork 4 integration with business processes, so this webcast is quite dense with technical references.

P.S. Pietro in the video says that he is assigning task in hours, bot of course it is in working days... .

See the webcast on Vimeo. Download the webcast: mov file (63MB), zipped mov (44MB), zipped flv (29MB). We promise to have smaller and friendlier files for next webcasts :-). You can also see it in our player here. The mov files can be watched with Quicktime or VLC, the flv with VLC and others.

Suggestions for topics that the webcasts should cover are welcome: use the UserVoice service, with requests as this one.

References in and around the webcast:

JBPM: http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm http://www.jboss.org/jbossjbpm
JPDL: http://www.jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jpdl
The creator of JBPM: Tom Baeyens, http://processdevelopments.blogspot.com (Teamwork and Open Lab are in no sense associated with JBoss.)

A previous blog post on these themes: http://twproject.blogspot.com/2008/10/teamwork-development-version-now.html
On worklow patterns in general: http://www.workflowpatterns.com
Interesting article on Infoq: http://www.infoq.com/articles/seven-fallacies-of-bpm

P.S. To be sure you understand what a flow is (from http://xkcd.com/518) :-)

Using social tools for managing projects

2008-12-29T13:34:00.010+01:00

A friend who works as project manager professional, a consultant at several public and private organizations in Rome, proposed me to use blogs as tools helping managing a project; this because it happens to him that introducing structured tools meets adoption resistance. Introducing work management from a community based platform is a quite novel approach, and could be quite in harmony with modern methodologies. We intend to progressively integrate this perspective too, and we did something already. Consider that with Teamwork's custom dashboards, you can integrate practically anything in your home page, in particular today that many online services are available as simple JavaScript calls.

You may have noticed that we are now using the User Voice service to collect users' feedback on Teamwork. User Voice is a refined and simple way to get feedback from your customers and contacts, even when you have only online contacts; it is an example of open access, where all users have equal rights of expression.

As an example of integration, we now provide a User Voice portlet, which you can set to point to your User Voice service; you will then select the requests which you want to deal with, creating corresponding issues in Teamwork.

In the image we have the portlet set in the home page.

More and more work management tools will need to transform into “linking” applications, places where different kinds of logging get linearized into a project. We’re working on this!

Pietro Polsinelli

P.S. If you are wondering about Teamwork's look in the screenshot, that is version 4.

Teamwork 3 final released

2008-12-18T18:06:00.008+01:00

Today (December 18, 2008) we released Teamwork 3 final (release 3.2.9 build 7187). It contains an extension of the internationalization coverage, in which we were helped by a German customer company (thanks!).

You can download the release here: http://www.twproject.com/download.page.

Teamwork 4 is now in beta; we will post extended coverage of the new features in the forthcoming weeks; we will also begin a series of webcasts, in the first one we'll take a look at some 4 beta features. Version 4 will be released for production at the end of next month (January); of course anybody who buys Teamwork 3 now will get a free upgrade to version 4.

You can post as usual feature requests on our uservoice service, and also themes to be discussed in the webcasts; if you want to get access to the beta version, just contact us.

New Teamwork introductory pages

2008-11-14T15:18:00.005+01:00

Forthcoming release of Teamwork will have brand new introductory pages, rich of links; this because we often find that in the evaluation phase users don't get to find some of the most useful features.

Following this idea, the entire interface has been rebuilt along "don't make me think" lines, while at the same time enriching the set of features.

In place edit in lists, more flexible dashboards components, more flexible project modeling and issue editing, a friendly search and ranking function: all this is coming together in a unique web based project management application which is likely more powerful that any competitor, and usable as the new social tools.

This will make it also easier to start simple, and add more along the way, lowering the initial adoption barrier which is one of the main reasons for pm software adoption failure.

Boot camp experiences: Vocabase

2008-11-04T20:12:00.001+01:00

One of the most recent and successful Teamwork boot camps has been at Vocabase, a Belgian software house. They develop voice portals, application servers operating telephone interactions between customers and support, and more. The boot camp lasted two days, and was in Waterloo (our hotel was in the "middle" of the battlefield).

Vocabase leading team is composed of Alain Rondenbosch, Robert Hopp and Jean-Michel Polfliet; after their gracious reception, we started by installing Teamwork in their intranet, and then proceeded presenting and discussing features and modeling of their processes.

As always happens in these cases, the customer points out to needs that lead to future improvements of Teamwork; in this case, in the resource planning section, and the relationship between worklogs and costs.

Usually our boot camps consist of a first (long) meeting with the (potential) project managers, finding the appropriate Teamwork models and procedures matching their work process; then a second meeting involving the entire team, demoing Teamwork usage and asking for feedback.

Teamwork is so flexible that modeling your projects and work with slim or large trees, using issues or not, using a single or multiple areas, are all open options, and a boot camp can speed up enormously adoption time.

Teamwork's adoption is generally a symptom of a developing culture for improving production through quality of work, and our impression of Vocabase is that this is the direction in which they are progressing.

Meeting and working with them has been a real pleasure, we wish them an even more successful future!

If you want to get a Teamwork boot camp, go here.

The complex relationship between projects and business processes

2008-10-23T16:36:00.020+02:00

Teamwork development version now includes Business Process integration. This is a really cool feature, as it gives a new dimension to projects, making it possible to model naturally complex processes, while maintaining the basic project based organization. The underlying technology is our implementation of Hibernate + JBPM, which gives the full generality and power of a proven business process framework.

In our meetings with customers we often presented two way of modeling their business processes: with projects, aimed at giving a minimal structure to work and collecting a maximal amount of feedback, work logs etc., or using business process models, which are workflows. Workflows are more rigid but more accurate. They are more complex to plan but often easier for the final user, who has jus to say "proceed" on her/his tasks when it is the case. So how could we give the opportunity to project managers to use business processes inside Teamwork without making the interface horribly clumsy? After much discussion, we made some choices:

- use JBPM, which holds data relationally and hence transparently, just like the rest of Teamwork

- process steps would be sedimented in tasks, so that say search in projects would keep on working on the same data, be it process driven projects or classical simply tree based projects

- non circular steps in processes (which of course are supported) would be modeled by tasks dependencies

- steps to be done will be presented to users in the same locations where she usually finds her assignments and tasks

So basically we have a wizard which given a process, lets you pick the assignments on the nodes of the process, and will generate a process instance which will guide project advancement, notifying and recording step progress. This is more flexible than the classical swimlane based business process assignment. Processes are defined in JPDL, a powerful business process which covers all the usual fork/join/milestone etc. needed in process management.

One could use Teamwork’s available custom forms to be associated particular steps of the process, hence having also a document process overlapping the business one. Other customization could be done in the action handlers, which handle the token entering or leaving a node.

Screenshots
In the first three screenshots you see three ways of looking at the same project: as a graph, swimlane based, and as a Gantt. It is the same project, and all the features that you have in these are enabled, like subscriptions, document management, issue tracking, and so on. Below also some of the ususal interface request "improved" with the process driven questions.

	As graph.
	By swimlanes.
	As Gantt.
	Task editor action.
	In my assignments.

Teamwork’s new installer

2008-10-23T15:30:00.000+02:00

In the wave of release of new features, we also deployed a new installer. We tried to create the first really user friendly multi-platform installer for a multi-database web application, and as you can guess by the length of the description, it wasn’t trivial.
Working on the Install4J’s platform, we added the creation of services on Windows and OSX platforms, and, in case launching services is not possible, automated launch from a console of the web server. We are thinking about whether it would be useful to install it as a “service” on say Debian/Ubuntu or RedHat distributions.
We improved the database test connection part, with improved Oracle-db interface and clearer error feedback.
But what we worked mostly on is making the installation really very, very easy for a first evaluation, so that it does not ask any technical question: it just installs Teamwork as a service on a default test db, and then opens the browser there. Then it will be quite easy to move to production. Just try it here so see how it has been done.

Most of the work has been done by our Roberto Baldi, who unfortunately for him presented it in a very bugged form in our weekly developer meeting, and had hence been confronted by a jeering crowd :-D

Disasters of data hostage

2008-10-14T22:17:00.000+02:00

Sorry, but I really can resist linking to this. Use your own database for critical data!!!

Pietro

Resource plan

2008-09-29T12:28:00.002+02:00

A preview of the "excel like" editing of the resource plan in the forthcoming "resource management" module.

Project management: simple, complex?

2008-09-28T13:11:00.001+02:00

Yet another university adopted Teamwork. Why so many
universities pick us?

Well, they need a flexible modeling tool, and Teamwork gives them this, not only because of modeling trees, but also because of the refined assignment model; definable node level role, and hence security, and so on.

Complex model must not imply a complex user interface, and this is where a lot of recent work on our part is being done, studying the extensive literature on the matter, doing user testing and new developments. A sample of the new results is the possibility of moduling load on an assignment through a resource plan and/or by issue break-down.

Authentication: standard, http, LDAP

2008-09-25T12:21:00.000+02:00

Teamwork currently (3.2.8) supports a built-in, we’ll call it “standard”, authentication (notice that Teamwork works fine also under https) , which is the usual login, and authentication provided by the container, we’ll call it “http authentication”. This allows both single-sign-on support and also LDAP authentication through say the Tomcat container, as detailed in the forum.

We are empowering authentication with a third modality, by having Teamwork contact directly the LDAP server, and also importing and updating users from LDAP via a scheduled job if needed. All this includes Active Directory; in this way, your LDAP will be the source of users and authentication. This third modality we’ll call it “LDAP”. It will make integration very easy, feasible completely just through the web interface. :-)

If users will require it, it will be quite easy to integrate also OpenId authentication.

UPDATE: Teamwork 3.2.9 includes direct LDAP import and authentication: see

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

Using Teamwork 3 with Chrome Beta

2008-09-02T22:19:00.002+02:00

After a few tests it seems to be fully compatible with Teamwork 3 - and with no effort on our part :-D

Chrome has a really smart way of navigating your recent links and using search results at the same time - we are preparing something on an analogous line and quite revolutionary for the forthcoming Teamwork releases - stay tuned..

Supporting Ical

2008-08-29T16:16:00.001+02:00

Today we completed integration between Teamwork agenda and Google calendar.
In the original project we just dispatched events created in Teamwork to Google calendar, but now we let users export a complete Teamwork agenda in Ical format in order to see all appointments on another calendar server (just like Google calendar but also in another Teamwork!).

Another added feature lets you import one or more external calendars in Ical format and see the events contained in it inside Teamwork’s agenda.

While building the integration, I’ve had all sorts of troubles with date format and time zone settings. In fact we couldn’t assume that calendars working together have the same time settings, so it was necessary to convert dates in the correct time zone every time we tried to do an export or an import.

Now everything works fine and it’s great! You can send every new event created in Teamwork to your Google calendar, you can see all your Google calendar events simply copying the given calendar’s address in Teamwork, and you can also do the opposite!

Teamwork and Alfresco integration

2008-08-29T11:18:00.001+02:00

Among the rich set of integrations possible with Teamwork, one which we are considering is integrating Alfresco document management with Teamwork's. We were discussing this at a customer (a bank), when they showed us that Alfresco provides file system network access to its document engine, so you can access the document tree throuh the network just by tipying a network address of the form \\alfrescoServer\... . Well then we immediately created a file storage pointing to the root of the alfresco server, so that the area manager can set on tasks roots the document root corresponding to it, and operate! So the inner flexibility of Teamwork gave us immediately a first, rough "integration" with Alfresco, which the customer loved, and makes them immediately operative.

Task/issue tree with (Ajax) edit in place - preview

2008-08-29T09:42:00.005+02:00

We have ready a new project tree in-place editor; it is really nice, as you can edit in-place any task, including scheduling, assignments and issues. It is also way faster for projects with a lot of nodes.

It is a non trivial feature because tasks in a project have the "annoying" feature that the changes in dates of one task can trigger the change of dates along the entire tree, so local editing becomes global editing all the time.

Technically, it is built with Ajax and a lot of help from jQuery.

In the second screenshot you see the project editor in the tree context:

Teamwork and your company's worth

2008-08-27T09:31:00.001+02:00

One of Teamwork's customers got acquired:

milano finanza news

Interestingly, they use Teamwork along the entire production line, and somehow the order with which they operate, using projects starting with the commercial contact, along to design, production and even logistics, was one of the positive factors led to the acquisition.

Teamwork Ical with Gmail and Google calendar

2008-08-22T09:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we tested Teamwork’s automatic Ical calendar export, by having a user with a Gmail e-mail, so that instead of downloading the Teamwork generated Ical message, it was Gmail getting it: it works perfectly. So this kind of synchronization of Teamwork and Google calendars works right now, with the current release (3.2.8), and without any effort from the user: she just writes her Gmail e-mail on her Teamwork user, creates appointments in Teamwork, and gets them almost immediately in her Google calendar.

Integrating Google calendar

2008-07-15T15:45:00.005+02:00

In the path of becoming the most open, integrated and widely compatible project management application there is, we are integrating Google calendar with Teamwork's shared agenda, adding this to ICal/Outlook integration. Our Silvia is following this; see her on Twitter. Stay tuned for this and other additional integrations!

Teamwork on YouTube

2008-06-06T15:45:00.010+02:00

Teamwork launches its own YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/teamworksoftware.

We're working on a complete video series about Teamwork's features.
Please watch our first video chapter and stay tuned for the next one.

The quality of the YouTube post is low because we are producing FLV videos, which cannot be published as such on YouTube; and the conversion FLV -> video -> FLV does not give good results. The final videos will be published on Teamwork site, so quality will be good there.

Teamwork listens and talks

2008-05-28T10:31:00.010+02:00

We are currently working on expanding and improving Teamwork’s capacities in “listening” to other applications, and “talking” to them. The improvements will be progressively released. In particular:

Project clients
MPX support has been improved, so that imports and exports can be done from and to localized versions of MPX’s. This is compatible with GanttProject (http://ganttproject.biz) and Microsoft Project formats and behavior (this improvement is included in release 3.2.7).

Data export
You already have the export to PDF functionality; we’ll add that all your filter/lists will be exportable in CSV format.

Listening to work logging
We are developing a functionality to import work log from different sources: one is Twitter (http://twitter.com), another one is Subversion commits (http://subversion.tigris.org), a third one is CVS commits (http://www.nongnu.org/cvs). The Twitter module will also let export Teamwork work logs to Twitter. The Subversion and CVS modules will also integrate in the file storage, allowing web access to repositories.

Synch of agendas
Ical (and hence Outlook) synchronization has been a will be further improved. We are also working on synchs with Google’s calendar.

A bit of mystery
There are other directions in which we are working, but are still in early alpha stage: let’s just say that we intend to facilitate migration from “data hostage” environments to our open structure.

Above image link.

Teamwork in Rome 12-15 May 2008

2008-05-10T12:34:00.003+02:00

After having been to expo's everywhere but in Italy, we decided to take part to ForumPA in Rome, in the project management cluster, organized by ISPM. Come see us!

Voice experiments for a new Project Management tutorial

2008-04-17T09:50:00.004+02:00

Yet more serious stuff from Teamwork's developers :-D

Project management by e-mail

2008-04-09T18:48:00.004+02:00

Project management and e-mail communication have a love-hate relationship; on the one side, e-mail is a bad idea for handling projects: A 10-to-1 rule of email based project management, and on the other side, it is the most comfortable mean of remote communication and information transmittal, sometimes even better then the browser, as it given less remote access problems.

Given the contemporary wave of "make it simple" software drafts hitting software aided project management, which easily gets too simplistic, tens of web based todo list softwares appeared, some of which try to handle matters through e-mail. Now if you try to use such things you'll end up in troubles fast, if only because you simply can't create and manage a project from an e-mail: projects, even very simple ones, need some structured data beyond name and the single person that has to do it, and you can't do this with an e-mail, unless you introduce a new syntax, and then you are deep into troubles.

So what we did is to let e-mail be a mean for handling additional information on a project already existing, like creating documents, issues, and todos: all this is explained at

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

and released since version 3.2.5.

We use Teamwork's technology for all our services

2008-04-07T18:27:00.001+02:00

I think that one of the reason why people could sort of trust us, is that we use Teamwork's technology for all our services: Teamwor's website runs on Webwork, which is the content management system built over the same platform as Teamwork (Teamwork's custom dashboards are actually a part of Webwork); Teamwork's forum is powered by the same application that runs Teamwork's project forums.
In some custome development, we integrated our worklflow engine, Flowork (based on JBPM) with Teamwork to manage complex flows; we have on line courses running on Learnwork, again the same technology. For our intranet we are empowering Teamwork's dashboard with Webwork in wiki mode. And there are many many many more.

Its funny to see development companies claiming to be technology leaders and not using their own technology for their own services..

Teamwork review on Serbian PC World!

2008-04-03T10:25:00.003+02:00

Well, we fortunately had a friend that translated it to us...

Here is the link:

http://www.mikro.co.yu/ser/casopis/tekst.php?id=7631

"Project management 2.0": keep projects simple, but NOT the software

2008-03-31T21:54:00.020+02:00

Here are some reflections that came to my mind reading various posts on "project management 2.0", somehow inspired by the "web 2.0" hype, for example:

View Upload your own

And some other links:
http://pm-blog.com/

http://pm-blog.com/2008/03/16/basecamp-projektmanagement-20/

Some reflections

Just imagine the dictatorial project manager, lone with his ugly and hugely complex MS project file, that is imposing work to all his slaves; he has a huge salary, and his employees/slaves are kept in the most economical working conditions, with strictly the most limited information access compatible with their doing their assigned job. The Gantt chart gets printed, with hundreds of tiny unreadable lanes, all sort of dependencies, attached somewhere on the wall, and totally ignored.

It is a diffused knowledge in software development, and by now not only there, that this kind of a-priori top-down centralized management most of the times leads to great failures.

There have been all kinds of reaction to this situation: agile methodologies, good working conditions, unlimited access to information, distributed planning and work logging application, dynamic “runtime” work reporting tools that allow real time planning evaluation and reaction.

There is one conclusion to be drawn: software-aided work management owes its occasional success mostly due to team continuous adoption of the software tools, instead of the a-priori drawing of a Gantt chart.

Adoption is possible if all is done to facilitate it: it should allow very simple data insertion, it should not force data duplication, it should be all done “in one place” whenever possible, it should present the most relevant information without making the user “chase” it.

Now anyone who has even little real experience in software-aided project management, is aware that work management is never simple, and things most of the time turn out to be more complex than planned.

The same happens when you start to use a software: if you remember the wonder sensation when you first started using Excel (I do), how naturally it did make data fit in its simple model. And would you ever have imagined that all the export, import, calculation, graphs and all those other functionalities would have been so useful? That you, not just an imaginary user, would have used them so many times? The fact is that good software must be provided in advance of cover for many, many, many limit case uses; this is something that the current Web 2.0 discussion is ignoring. And should provide also some easy way to expand functionality. "Keeping project trees simple" does not at all imply that you need a powerless software to manage work. Even small groups’ work quickly gets complex, and involves issues, documents, a shared agenda, meetings, and you won’t be able to make sense of this by using a hundred different, separate, immature social web based solutions.

Let’s consider security problems for even a medium-small company, say with a hundred employees. I bet that no one can find a single example of such a company where everyone can see all the information floating in the company in the IT structure. But more: there will always be local exceptions to a simple role-based security model, because there will always turn up a particular project that has its own security: its limit cases are the killers, and you need powerful software to cover those.

Another typically ignored fact that makes the discussion about Web 2.0 a bit ethereal is that today software does not get adopted in a void, in particular if we are considering business oriented software. So a “deeply intimate” software choice like that of a project management application must consider how will such software interact with existing one, like the old AS-400 accounting application, how will it comply with data privacy and so on. Using a closed box online webapp is simply not a solution for most cases.

Microsoft Project, but also "web 2.0 project managent", are deeply incompatible with all the above considerations. Project management 2.0 concerns the methodology, and also the software, but nothing of the sort of "web 2.0 project managent" can be the answer.

Our Teamwork is structurally compatible with the above, though certainly not perfect from the point of view of fast access of information: but this improving this is the target of coming releases. Maybe it will not be the killer app, but at least we start from realistic considerations.

Traditionally large companies got their work and project management software as a custom solution. What hasn't been realized by both developers and reviewers is that there is no difference in needs that a custom and not custom solution must satisfy. And the difference in IT needs between large and small companies is getting thinner; but the solution is to bring the qualities of a custom solution of a shrink-wrapped one, and not the other way round!

Some of the things one can do with a locally installable version and not with a “Web 2.0 online service”: install it on https, integrate it with a single sign-on service, integrate it with application server authentication, connect it with custom file server services (like FTP), integrate it with versioning servers (like SVN), integrate it with LDAP, various synchronization services at database level, integrate with job scheduling services, …

Paper is better than superficial software solutions

2008-03-19T12:16:00.008+01:00

In this very nice post, Introducing the Hipster PDA, a good point is made about how practical software-free, paper management can be.

In case you want extend beyond the reach of personal management, you may start using cards in full glory:

Getting Things Done with Index Cards
Getting Things Done With Index Cards 2.0

I think that the pictures actually start seeding some doubt that all this paper will end up in a great mess. It's not in serious doubt the usefulness of software for project management in the case of work of more than two people, if the software can deal with the matter at hand, and in particular with limit cases.

My "laws for the usefulness of project management software" are:
- work management software is useful only in a complex work management situation
- work gets complex much faster than any prediction you make (this last is clearly inspired by Murphy's laws)

And my (ad ad ad - beware) is that Teamwork is one of the few that can deal with the complexity of the matter at hand...

Scrum and re-scheduling

2008-03-13T18:28:00.011+01:00

A smart Scrum team leader that is using Teamwork (yes - there is such a thing - smart and using Teamwork) pointed us a practical point: suppose that you are a developer and are assigned a set of issues, on which you do your development and record development time spent. You did with the team the initial evaluation of needed development time, and suppose for a particular issue you decided to put 10 hours.
Now you recorded time elapsed, but as happens all the time in life, you have to reschedule some of the issues. Now the users remarked that it is quite cumbersome to reason on the base of estimated duration - worklog done, because all you are actually focused on is time remaining.

So.. here is the change: by clicking on worklog done, a time remaining panel appears, and its editable right there.

This little practical change, can make a difference; think when you have planned 34 hours, and have done 27:30, how many to go, will it suffice.. I don't want spend time on that.
This improvement will be included in forthcoming 3.2.4 release.

We are happy that more and more people integrate their software development management with Teamwork, its a sign that a too-narrow view of software management (only issue-track, with hundreds of floating numeric fields.. aaargh) is not the right way, and at the same time, that a too simplistic view of work management software can't work; so you need Teamwork, which is darn hard, but gets it done in the end, the way you want it. Love your feedback!

Teamwork sales cartogram

2008-03-04T14:21:00.000+01:00

To celebrate our all-time best sales month, February 2008, we created a cartogram of our sales-by-month.

Above the sales are just by darker greens, below also the surface is proportional to sales: it's a cartogram, i.e. a map in which area is not preserved.

The algorithm used is by Gastner and Newman's, and the software to generate it is (an adaptation of) cartogram generator output.

We hope to get a lot of transformations from here on!

Monitoring project costs

2008-02-18T15:14:00.000+01:00

Open Lab has been using Teamwork since 2002. Today our production manager comes to us (the Teamwork's development group) and she tells us "with the accounting guys we verified the 2007 budgets and project costs with Teamwork, and it worked like a charm". Now there was a distinctive surprised tone in her voice, which we surely didn't appreciate. We just grunted some noise, and went back to coding.

Teamwork as a Java web development platform

2008-02-10T14:09:00.000+01:00

Teamwork's development platform is gradually widening its adoption. Built over Hibernate, we always believed that what a platform must provide is tools for the user interface, instead of focusing on the business logic. For the latter, we have the relational model, which enriched with the object model provides simple tools to get a good solution.

This is in contrast with the Java "server-side" tradition, where the focus is on the business logic; then for the interface the most wildly un-maintenable and rigid frameworks have been proposed. Over-use of local MVC has made code unmaintanable: in such frameworks a button's behaviour cannot be determined from the code "local to the button", which is a smart way for torturing the developer. So then developers over-react, leaving Java and going to over-simplified languages-plus-frameworks, like Ruby-on-rails.

Teamwork's framework minimizes complexity and configuration, greatly increasing productivity, still remaining compatible with complex object-relational requirements and enterprise needs. We've seen teams develop complete CRM applications in a couple of months.
Pietro Polsinelli

You can’t be serious, man

2008-02-07T11:31:00.000+01:00

I remember summers when I was a child in England, watching McEnroe on TV. So when I see the project management solutions people consider, it just comes to my mind; “You can’t be serious, man!”. I mean, it’s incredible what commercials get to sell to customers. Some companies really believe that they can have projects and work data on a third party on-line service? I mean, a company with more than two people can take that? And you can accept not to have such data on your database? I mean, no access but through that closed-source web based software? Online services and software houses come and go. You also should have some familiar way to talk and question such data. Add pages, reports, whatever to the application. I mean, we are not talking about an mp3 player, which just has to play mp3s (and even there, you may want more); its your company's data!

You really believe that issue-tracking is all you need for managing software development? Nowhere today software is made only by developers.

I understand that our competitors have stronger marketing means. But believing such stuff.. you can’t be serious, man!
Pietro Polsinelli

P.S. A friend remarked: "In your line, to be serious you'd need a custom solution!". Well, yes: what we try to supply with Teamwork is as close as possible to a custom solution, at the price of a schrink-wrapped one...

Teamwork in Sweden

2008-02-04T14:23:00.000+01:00

Teamwork is popular in Sweden. Roberto and myself also just been there to do some integration development, and it was a very nice experience: we worked with a team 50% Swedish, 50% Pakistan and Indian, and they seem to make a nice group.

We mapped the default task structure and their ISO certification roles in Teamwork, seeing how this can be used in Scrum sprints. We created an additional web part "your responsibilities", to evidence the ISO roles, and improved the "my issues" one, for issue-based developers.

Many friendly features forthcoming in 3.2.3 release!

Pietro Polsinelli

Several Java developer positions open in Florence, Italy

2008-02-02T11:03:00.000+01:00

Due to our expanding market, in Open Lab there are the following open positions:

- Two Java web developers. Proficiency in Java, knowledge of web protocols, HTML, JavaScript required.

- One Natural Language Parsing (NLP) developer; required proficiency in Java.

- One Project Manager position, supervising several customization projects; proficiency in Java and some seniority required.

More detailed information can be obtained by writing or calling us; please send résumés and info requests to info@open-lab.com .

Recurring rumours about the identity of mobbed and mobber

2008-01-17T21:13:00.000+01:00

There are recurring rumours about the authors of this blog to be Teamwork's staff members.

Our article on Mokabyte: Hibernate full-text searches

2008-01-15T13:11:00.001+01:00

We just published an article in Italian on Mokabyte on full-text searches with Hibernate Search. Thanks as usual to our friend Alberto Brandolini for help and encouragement.
Roberto Bicchierai and Pietro Polsinelli

Relocating Teamwork data

2008-01-03T11:59:00.000+01:00

We are buiding a new powerful functionality: in Teamwork it will be possible to export all or some area's data to a zipped archive, and to import it in another Teamwork instance, just through the web interface. For example, this will allow to move data from online to a local installation; to move data from one database to another, to have a backup etc. .

Technically, we'll do it as follows: you need a Hibernate Factory clone, on its own dialect/connection, but with the same persistent entities, which will loop through the persisted instances, saving them in a temporary Hsqldb instance, and ten zip the resulting script. Vice-versa for the import.

Christmas greetings

2007-12-27T19:53:00.000+01:00

Our graphical department realized this Christmas greetings animation.

At the same time they launched a new graphical and design service and website: MoreThanIcons. Good luck to them!

The evolution of Teamwork 3 - 4

2007-12-19T14:28:00.000+01:00

What will be produced for the next releases? We are currently developing several features to enrich further 3 and eventually 4 releases of capabilities which will extend Teamwork user friendliness and integrability.

Some examples of user friendliness:

- full text searches, and a fast search unified interface

- ranking of all actions done, hence availability of new web parts for "popular" objects

All this goes in the direction of making the application smarter about what you want to see and do first. In this perspective, we are also doing first experiments for building a new client, which will have limited but extremely intuitive functionality - more on this in future posts.

Integrability:

- all objects available as web services, allowing data mashups, custom clients etc.

- LDAP import/export

Using Hibernate Search with complex requirements

2007-11-14T12:50:00.001+01:00

Authors:
Roberto Bicchierai (e-mail: rbicchierai@open-lab.com)
Pietro Polsinelli (e-mail: ppolsinelli@open-lab.com)

Introduction

We’ll suppose here that you have your Java web application, persisted on Hibernate, and you want to enable full-text searches.

Your main aim is to have a single search page which will find stuff wherever it is in your application, whether it is on persisted objects fields, "long" text fields (clobs), attached documents (blobs), uploaded files (say on the file system).

Adding Hibernate Search to your toolset will probably directly meet most of your requirements, but for more refined requirements and flexibility, you may need to add some functionality; here you will find some inspiration and tricks to build your solution.

In the following we assume some familiarity with basic indexing and Lucene concepts, such as can be gained from the excellent “Lucene in Action” book (see References).

Problem set

You start with (hopefully, a subset) of this problem set:

1. Simplicity. Want to keep maintainable code: hence you want to keep persistence and indexing configuration "in the same place"

2. Lob fields. Have fields on objects which may be clob/blob type, or link to files on the file system

3. Multi documents. Have objects of type "document", which themselves may have attachments, which have a lifecycle contained in main objects, and you want to search on them, but find the main objects as referrals: e.g. task/documents.

4. Languages. You have to index data in different languages. This is not a remote case; for example, in all countries of the European Union (excluding UK and Eire), you will have at least data and documents in the country’s own language and in English.

5. Document formats. You have documents in various formats:

6. Paging. You want to present paginated results

7. Security. As in all cases of full-text search, you may have problems concerning security

Solutions

In considering these solutions, keep in mind that Hibernate Search is a very flexible framework: so the solutions we propose here are just one way to do it among many.

1. Simplicity. Wanting to keep maintainable code, hence keeping persistence and indexing configuration "in the same place" is a way of describing Hibernate Search.

One of the nice effects of using Hibernate Search, is that when you delete a persistent object, the Lucene index is also updated and all documents referring to the entity are removed too.

2. Lob fields. A solution perfectly in line with Hibernate Search is provided by our wiki contribution here:

http://www.hibernate.org/432.html

3. Multi documents. Here we introduce an original solution: a very simple scheduled job which handles a queue of documents, modeled by the class DataForLucene, to be indexed asynchronously. This approach gives you more flexibility, allowing to freely manage the number of Lucene documents associated to the same entity, and how and what gets in the index.

Here is the DataForLucene class:

/**
* Written by
* Roberto Bicchierai rbicchierai@open-lab.com
* Pietro Polsinelli ppolsinelli@open-lab.com
* for the Teamwork Project Management application - http://www.twproject.com
*/
public class DataForLucene {

public Serializable id;
public Class clazz;
public Serializable areaid;
public PersistentFile pf;
public long expiry;

public void indexMe() {

PersistenceContext pc = null;
IndexWriter w = null;
try {

pc = HibernateFactory.newFreeSession();

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.createFullTextSession(pc.session);
SearchFactory searchFactory = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory();

clazz = (Class) Class.forName(PersistenceHome.deProxy(clazz.getName()));
DirectoryProvider[] provider = searchFactory.getDirectoryProviders(clazz);
org.apache.lucene.store.Directory directory = provider[0].getDirectory();
String content = TextExtractor.getContent(pf, pc);
String guessedLanguage = IndexingBricks.guess(content);

w = new IndexWriter(directory, true, new SnowballAnalyzer(IndexingBricks.stemmerFromLanguage(guessedLanguage)));

String abstractOfContent = JSP.limWr(content, 5000);

Document doc = new Document();

Field classField =
new Field(
DocumentBuilder.CLASS_FIELDNAME,
clazz.getName(),
Field.Store.YES,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(classField);

Field docidField =
new Field(
"id",
id.toString(),
Field.Store.YES,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(docidField);

Field contentField =
new Field(
"content",
content,
Field.Store.NO,
Field.Index.TOKENIZED);
doc.add(contentField);

Field absField =
new Field(
"abstract",
abstractOfContent,
Field.Store.COMPRESS,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(absField);

Field fullcontentField =
new Field(
"fullcontent",
content,
Field.Store.NO,
Field.Index.TOKENIZED);
doc.add(fullcontentField);

Field pfField =
new Field(
"persistentFile",
pf.serialize(),
Field.Store.YES,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(pfField);

Field areaId =
new Field(
"area.id",
"" + areaid,
Field.Store.YES,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(areaId);

Field language =
new Field(
"language",
guessedLanguage,
Field.Store.YES,
Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED);
doc.add(language);

w.addDocument(doc);

} catch (Throwable throwable) {
Tracer.platformLogger.error(throwable);
} finally {
if (w != null)
try {
w.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
Tracer.platformLogger.error(e);
}
if (pc != null)
try {
pc.commitAndClose();
} catch (PersistenceException e) {
Tracer.platformLogger.error(e);
}
}
}

public boolean equals(Object o) {
return this.compareTo(o) == 0;
}

public int hashCode() {
return (clazz.getName() + id).hashCode();
}

public int compareTo(Object o) {
DataForLucene forLucene = ((DataForLucene) o);
return (clazz.getName() + id + pf.serialize()).compareTo(forLucene.clazz.getName() + forLucene.id + forLucene.pf.serialize());
}

}

Here is the simplest possible indexing machine implementation:

/**
* Written by
* Roberto Bicchierai rbicchierai@open-lab.com
* Pietro Polsinelli ppolsinelli@open-lab.com
* for the Teamwork Project Management application - http://www.twproject.com
*/
public class IndexingMachine extends TimerTask {

public static IndexingMachine machine = new IndexingMachine();
public long tick = 10000;
private boolean stopped = true;
private boolean indexing = false;

private static List toBeExecuteds = new ArrayList();

private IndexingMachine() {
}

public static void start() {

machine.stopped = false;

if (!machine.indexing) {
machine.run();
}
}

public static void stop() {
machine.stopped = true;
}

public void run() {

if (toBeExecuteds.size() > 0) {
DataForLucene ij = toBeExecuteds.get(0);
synchronized (toBeExecuteds) {
toBeExecuteds.remove(0);
}
indexing = true;
ij.indexMe();
indexing = false;
}

if (toBeExecuteds.size() > 0)
tick = 20;
else
tick = 10000;

if (!machine.stopped && !machine.indexing) {
Timer t = new Timer(false);
machine = new IndexingMachine();
machine.stopped = false;
t.schedule(machine, tick);
}
}

public static void addToBeIndexed(Identifiable i, Serializable areaId, PersistentFile pf) {
DataForLucene ij = new DataForLucene();
ij.clazz = i.getClass();
ij.id = i.getId();
ij.areaid = areaId;
ij.pf = pf;
if (!toBeExecuteds.contains(ij))
synchronized (toBeExecuteds) {
toBeExecuteds.add(ij);
}
}

public static int getQueueSize() {
return toBeExecuteds.size();
}

public static boolean isRunning() {
return !machine.stopped;
}

public static boolean isIndexing() {
return machine.indexing;
}

}

Notice that in DataForLucene we must put references to the persistent entity in a way compatible with Hibernate Search indexing, so that for example on entity deletion you will get removal also of these documents. More generally, you need to have a uniform index structure to be able to query it.

4. Languages. You need to know the language in which a document is written, in order to correctly index it; once you know the language, you can instantiate say the Snowball analyzer with the correct language stemmer. To make a practical system, you will need to guess the documents language from its content. We have found a very simple and effective solution, based on TCatNG, which is released under BSD, and. You actually need 10 classes (instead of 117 in the sources), only a subset of those directly in the package pt.tumba.ngram.
In order to make a content “findable” also when searching from a language (say, German) a document in another language (say, English), we actually double indexed the content field, once with the nowball analyzer and once with the simple StopAnalyzer; so that if you are searching from German and you search “Telefunken”, which stemmed would be searched as “Telefunk”, will find also “Telefunken” in English documents ? .

5. Document formats. We provide a simple implementation of text extraction, inspired as always by a “keep it simple” philosophy, for which the Luis sources gave us some help. For a more mature (and complex) approach, check out the Nutch project.

private static String extractFromStream(String fileName, InputStream inputStream) throws Exception {

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
String content ="";

if (fileName.endsWith(".pdf")) {
PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(inputStream);
stripper.writeText(document, sw);
content = content + sw.getBuffer().toString();
document.close();

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".doc")) {
WordExtractor we = new WordExtractor();
content = we.extractText(inputStream);

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".htm") || fileName.endsWith(".html")) {
Node root = getDOMRoot(inputStream);
content = getTextContentOfDOM(root);

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".ppt")) {
PPTIndexer reader = new PPTIndexer();
content = reader.getContent(inputStream);

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".xls")) {
ExcelIndexer reader = new ExcelIndexer();
content = reader.getContent(inputStream);

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".rtf")) {
DefaultStyledDocument sd = new DefaultStyledDocument();
RTFEditorKit kit = new RTFEditorKit();
kit.read(inputStream, sd, 0);
content = sd.getText(0, sd.getLength());

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".zip") || fileName.endsWith(".war") || fileName.endsWith(".jar")) {
Set files = Zipping.getZipContents(inputStream);
for (File file : files) {
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(file);
content = content + extractFromStream(file.getName(),fis);
fis.close();
}

} else if (fileName.endsWith(".txt") || fileName.endsWith(".log")) {
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));
String line;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(line);
sb.append(" ");
}
content = sb.toString();
}
return content;
}

6. Paging. For this, you can use out of the box our paging solution, as Hibernate Search results are usual Hibernate Pages: see

http://www.hibernate.org/314.html

7 Security. For this, you may need to add data to the index: suppose you have am ASP based service, like our Teamwork. As a first rough approximation, you could save the ASP account to which the document belong: we did this by having the account (which we call area) as an @IndexedEmbedded class, and doing the same on our DataForLucene.
Hibernate Search supports the filter notion, but this seems a bit limited as it acts at a Lucene document level.

References

Lucene:
http://lucene.apache.org

Hibernate Search:
http://www.hibernate.org/410.html

Language guessing API, TCatNG :
http://tcatng.sourceforge.net

Offline text extraction with Hibernate Search: our contribution on Hibernate’s Wiki:
http://www.hibernate.org/432.html

Paging with Hibernate: our contribution on Hibernate’s Wiki
http://www.hibernate.org/314.html

Luis search engine:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lius

The Nutch project:
http://lucene.apache.org/nutch

“Lucene in Action”, ,Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher, Manning, 2004
http://www.manning.com/hatcher2

Sample classes are taken from Teamwork:
http://www.twproject.com

Our contribution to Hibernate Search project:

2007-11-06T14:03:00.000+01:00

Hibernate Search: Offline text extraction

Suppose that using Hibernate Search you want to index not only the standard persistent content of your objects, like string contents such as name, description etc., but also external references to files, such as PDF documents, HTML contents and so on.

We are going to address the following problem: if you use Hibernate Search in the simplest way to index such properties of your indexed objects, text extraction will happen at the same time as the storing of the objects, and hence in a transactional scope, hanging thread completion until text extraction is completed, even if indexing is done asynchronously, which is an option in Hibernate Search.

full article...

Full text search is among lots of exciting new features that we will be releasing in the next few months.

Running Teamwork on JBoss (4.2.2)

2007-10-29T13:59:00.000+01:00

Today we deployed Teamwork as a war on JBoss 4.4.2, and it works fine; only take care about the Hibernate release, as it should be compatible (for Teamwork 3.2.1, its Hibernate 3.2.4 with Annotations 3.3.0 and Search 3.0). Given our minimal requirements, it's no surprise that it runs fine, but its good to be sure.

Moving from Microsoft Project to web based management

2007-10-24T16:52:00.001+02:00

Spaghetti Project Management
Thanks to several examples provided by our customers (for debugging purposes, or because of mehodological questions), I've started to acquire a certain experience in how Microsoft Project is really used, and what one should do when moving to web based project management.

Some users were setting in Microsoft Project everything as a task: micro management issues, meetings in the agenda, points to discuss; this seems practical, as everything is in one file, as long as one does not have to share such information.
This habit brings about also other problems: it shows an unrealistic assumption about work, as every little detail, like a quick meeting, has to be planned in advance, and by a single person; but this is not how work (and life) goes.
Such unreadable and excessively detailed plan is bound to be at best ignored by the rest of the team, if explicit refusal is impossible due to authority.
So, users search for more "acceptable" solutions, and start by... importing the original project tree! So the initial situation is even worse, because a web based application can't compete with a client in managing complex trees.

Agile, practical management
The way to agile, practical management is to have simple trees and few assignments; you have to distribute the original tree information in the appropriate, confortable places you find in Teamwork, which does a lot of work to help you. Getting users to insert their worklog is always a hard-won victory, and a great result for the company, which will gain more and more value in time . We on the software side are working really hard to release ever lmore friendly software, without loosing power available to project managers and the system integrators. I recently realized that the simplest "worklog" software of all is Twitter; the only problem is.. that it does nothing.

Pietro Polsinelli

.. and they lived happily ever after

2007-10-12T12:13:00.000+02:00

Having seen and helped thousand of users installing and trying Teamwork, I have began noticing recurring patterns, leading to happiness or ruin in the Teamwork experience. I can now often predict which path the user will take, right after her/his preliminary steps.
So here I hope to give some hints to avoid the path to ruin. I think that it can be of help even if you don't understand all technical details.

Choosing the online service
I have become a fan of the online service, at least for an evaluation (in which you should discard speed considerations, as you can always end up with a local installation): it works well and there are no systemic worries for the customers. Sometimes users underestimate the complexity of installing, exposing and protecting a server database application accessible via http; by using the online service, you are free of all that.
There are of course good reasons for choosing instead to install Teamwork locally, among which there are speed and power; but among them there aren't concerns for privacy. It may sound rude, but we are not at all interested in customer's data, and actually the European Union laws protecting privacy are terribly serious (actually, too restrictive IMHO), so we don't want to know anything about your data.
The paths to ruin in case of the online service are few:

(ruin) Real production data gets inserted online with the idea of "transferring" it in some uncertain future to a local database.
Not in all cases this can be done, and in all cases, it is a non trivial task: Teamwork’s data is structured, databases have with referential integrity.

(ruin) First things the main user does is fiddling with security settings.
By main user we mean the one who created the account, which is by default the area manager, i.e. the admin of the account, e.g. creates the other users.
This attitude actually is a sure path to ruin also in case of a local installation. Default security settings are fine for the vast majority of situations; while little Teamwork-specific competence is needed to start using it, in depth confidence with the application is needed to set up a different security model; it is best done in a later stage.

(happiness) Leave security as it is found after installation, work on projects, resources and assignments, security will be eventually handled once familiar with the basic work management features.

Installing Teamwork
If this is the choice, there are several ways that lead to ruin:

(ruin) Launch the installer not as root while not logged as root.
The installer must rename files, create others, and launch Tomcat, and there operations normally require administrative rights.

(ruin) Not using the installer.
While it is true that Teamwork is just a web-application, the installation process is not entirely trivial: the graphical installer does some job for you, which is not always easy to do “by hand”, for example, testing the JDBC-connection to the database, or that the HTTP port is free.

(happiness) Install as root in a graphical environment on the real, final database, and when happy move the web app on the "text only - only for experts" linux server.

Updating Teamwork
The fastest path to ruin is

(ruin) Not having done a complete backup of the web application and database before upgrade.
Another sure way to ruin is:

(ruin) Tomcat is not really down while doing the upgrade.
Tomcat notoriously has problems in shutting down, so check in the services (via ps -ax or Task Manager or whatever your OS uses) that it is really down before upgrading.

Using Teamwork
(ruin) Start with the ambitious plan of inserting in Teamwork all projects modeled with very fine grained tree structures.
This is a path to ruin because it will be hard to keep up to such standards. Users will feel the interface as cumbersome, and teamwork will be slowly abandoned.

(happiness) Start with a very simple set of tasks, mostly just roots, and few assignments per each user. Use massively stickys, boards, subscriptions to give a feel of the advantages of the software.
If the entire workgroup gets quickly a feel for the application, it will be more likely that they will keep using it in time.

Teamwork 3.2.1 is out: what's next?

2007-09-28T13:29:00.000+02:00

This latest release contains an expanded agenda management, which now includes meeting management, and a lot of fine tunings; in particular, we worked on improving character encoding compatibility both in input data and in document names. Much help came from feedback of users of the online version.

So, what's next? Well, we are architecting and doing first draft development of Teamwork 4. Actually, more than a "4" version, we will create a new front end application, of which what is now Teamwork will be a sort of "backoffice". I can't reveal what the front end idea is, but we are aiming at drastically lowering the adoption barrier, which in our opinion is still the stumbling block of this kind of software.

Teamwork currently has an advantage over competitors in the refined model and in the "IT-biocompatibility" side; but we want it to become much friendlier on the interface side.

For the first time, Teamwork development may not be entirely self founded; we are having first contacts with investors (actually, being contacted by VCs after the Jolt Award gave us the idea of searching external founding), and if you want more information, write me (ppolsinelli at open - lab [dot] com) and we'll get back to you.

Pietro Polsinelli

Teamwork as tool for Project Management courses

2007-09-28T08:49:00.000+02:00

Given its refined modeling capacities, Teamwork is often chosen by universities as supporting application for project management courses.

It is currently used in universities located in Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, USA, Africa (Monash University), Chile, Saudi Arabia.

Teamwork video

2007-09-26T10:07:00.000+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD-V7sEQzpk&mode=related&search=

:-D

Audit trail

2007-09-14T10:08:00.000+02:00

We updated the audit trail module for 3.2 releases; it gives a complete and readable audit of all the "auditable" objects. It doesn't seem to impact performance too much, and results are optimized for inspection.

We used Hibernate's interceptors at session level, so the module has garanteed completeness: there is no "hand-maintenance" to be done on persistent objects, which is a further guarantee for certification purposes.

Meeting management

2007-08-09T10:16:00.001+02:00

We are preparing release 3.2.1, which includes a new module: committee and meeting management.

When we started modeling this new section, we realized that Teamwork has already the notion of committee, i.e. the set of assignees on the task, and a (recurrent) meeting notion, on the agenda events. So we created a new object bringing the two together, created the notion of “discussion point”, and started building the business logic and views.

Teamwork on the iPhone

2007-08-06T11:11:00.001+02:00

Almost everything works :-)

Actiually, it is a while that we are testing Teamwork on Safari, and we are approaching full compatibility. Forthcoming release 3.2.1 should be compatible.

Importing (I)calendar appointments: Outlook stand-alone and integrated with Exchange server

2007-07-06T14:05:00.000+02:00

Thanks to some smart customers, we extended calendar event import in Teamwork to Outolooks integrated with Exchange Server (® Microsoft Corporation). Exchange server calendar events are sent in multipart form, differently from stand-alone Outlooks, so we had to extend parsing.

The extended procedure is released in 3.2.0 build 347.

The future of web applications over Java and ORM

2007-07-05T16:31:00.000+02:00

Well, a really nice post from Mr. King, "oneofthafew":

In defence of the RDBMS

funny how rare contact with reality is in the development community. Fortunately, the Hibernate group always kept a solid sense of what a practical solution has to be, ignoring hype, and we tried to follow suit. Anyway, web interfaces, Java and ORM seem more and more here to stay.

The so called "impedance mismatch between the architectural approach of the object oriented application such as built in Java and where the data is stored in a relational database management" actually resolves in an advantage due to separation of concerns and richness of applicable models. For the latter, it is very confortable to be free to drill, group and move through data both in its object and its relational form. In fact this spectrum of options is among Teamwork's competitive advantages.

Pietro Polsinelli

Integrate your Java agenda and ICalendar clients (Outlook) with iCal4j

2007-05-09T09:41:00.000+02:00

Introduction

This post concerns integrating a calendar/agenda you created in your Java application with external clients. It is a relevant feature, because applications are not released in a void, but in a world where people already use several applications, among which often there is a calendar client, typically Microsoft Outlook, sometimes also integrated with Exchange Server. Then there are all the non-Microsoft people, with several different clients and tools (see here for a list). So if you build a group calendar management, by making it interact with the agenda clients you will be lowering considerably the adoption barrier.

What's nice of the presented solution is that

it works with most clients, through the ICalendar standard,
is compatible with the presence of a calendar group server,
its very light: we just use mail headers and a simple textual standard (ICalendar).

In particular it requires just development effort, but no investment in expensive components.

Your Java application
We use Teamwork as example application which has to be integrated. We assume that you have built a solution to keep track in Java of your team's calendar, managing also recurrent events of the different kinds, which is the hardest part: you have to manage daily, weekly, monthly and yearly recurrences, answering fast to questions like "when will the two appointments 'all 4th of month' and 'every Tuesday every two weeks' next intersect? Outlook does all of this, so you need to provide a formalization in your app to synch with it. People (or "resources") involved will be identified by their e-mail in he synch process, and actually this is what Outlook does when you "invite" resources to join meetings.

iCal4j
A basic free tool which you should use is the iCal4j API, through which you will get Java objects modeling ICalendar messages. In our implementation, we had to add a "fake" property to the set provided by iCal4j because of problems with the "CN=..." format, but this is a side detail.

Action
The flow of group meetings creation, editing and approval can go in several directions, and you have to handle all of them.

Create event in Teamwork and send copy to clients

For this, after saving its internal event, your application must send an e-mail to every participant, containing the V-event generated with iCal4J.

You will put the organizer of the event, and the attendees. Set as "UID" of the V-event your event id.

To make Outlook recognize it as an calendar event, put in the mail header

"text/calendar;method=REQUEST;charset="UTF-8"

and Outlook will recognize it, presenting the mail received as in the picture.

The appointment will be put in Outlook's calendar when received, and it will be possible to accept them or not.

Notice that if you update an event in your app, and resend it, Outlook will recognize it as an instance of the preceding event, and automatically update the event - (very nice!); this you get by setting the UID field.

Create event in Outlook and make your app aware of this

We did this simply by making our application capable of downloading e-mail. Then when you create your appointment in Outlook, you just "send" it to your app, by having among the attendees the e-mail of your app. You need a scheduled mail download (and hence a job handler), and to parse the received relevant string body part in a V-event, which too is provided by the Ical4j API: in particular, you have to consider the cases

Method.REQUEST.equals(iCalendar.getMethod()) ...

and by working on the V-event UID you can decide whether to create or update an event in your web-app, which will be the final step. To recognize the e-mail received as one relative to calendar, look at the content type which will be "text/calendar". Notice that you will also receive "DECLINED" events, in which case you must remove that attendee from your event.

Conclusion
The outline above can proceed further by handling people who want to remove themselves from event. Then it is natural to proceed in the integration by exporting contacts from the mail client to your application; this is exactly how we proceeded in Teamwork's case, but this is another matter.

More can be found at http://www.twproject.com/icalendar.page .

Teamwork and ICalendar/Outlook integration

2007-04-30T18:47:00.001+02:00

We completed Teamwork and ICalendar/Outlook integration, just by using e-mail headers and ICalendar's contents. In this way, Teamwork can serve as an "exchange" server, for groups of people using Outlook as client; you can create meetings interchangeably either in Teamwork or in Outlook, and find them in both cases in both agendas. We are preparing a detailed blog post on how this was done technically.

You could have people involved in Teamwork only through their email/calendar client.

ICalendar integration opens a host of exchange possibilities, given the wide spectrum of ICalendar adoption: from the Wikipedia link above:

"It is implemented/supported by a large number of products, including 30 Boxes, Apple's iCal application, Darwin Calendar Server, Contactizer and iPod, Chandler, Drupal with its event module, Citadel, Facebook, FirstClass, Google Calendar, Jalios JCMS, KOrganizer, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Entourage, Mozilla Calendar (including Mozilla Sunbird), Mulberry, Novell Evolution, Novell GroupWise, Nuvvo, Simple Groupware, Upcoming.org, Windows Calendar, Webical, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and Microsoft Outlook (see below). ..."

Actually, Teamwork now can download e-mails in general; we have already made it possible to create resources in Teamwork simply by sending a VCard by e-mail, and to add documents to a project sending them as attachments by e-mail.

Last but not least, Outlook and Thunderbird contacts (generally, from CSV files) can now be interactively imported as Teamwork's resources!

All this will be out in 3.2.0, and will be free for all current customers.

P.S. June 22, 2007: Video documentation is now available: see http://www.twproject.com/Agenda.page

The Aztec calendar picture is from Flickr, as the pink one.

Digg into Teamwork to find gold

2007-04-10T10:36:00.001+02:00

There are many levels of Teamwork' usage. One may just start using the introductory pages, maybe directly online, hence sparing also setup, and be quite happy. But the application can give considerable satisfaction also to users who want to dig technology; we have "hidden" inside Teamwork's interface and API several enterprise aspects, which may turn useful any time, and which are normally available only in enterprise custom solutions. Several of the features below are not available out of the box: but everything needed to proceed with integration is provided, as it has been done for some customisation; years of corporate integration development have not passed in vain.

We hope that the new wide "friendly administrator settings" screen (a part of it in the picture) will help giving an idea of the power of the application.

Some examples:

- built-in audit engine
- clustering of job engines
- single sign on via http authentication support
- injection of custom reports
- JBPM built-in integration
- EJB3 annotation supported
- authenticated e-mail support
- automated web-based schema evolution
- web based web server administration
- UTF-8 supporting web-editable labels
- complex QBE querying possible from all fields
- computed numerical fields
- injectable schema naming strategy
- injectable settings
- LDAP and Active Directory role read functionality

Inside Teamwork's commercial policy: Easter promotion

2007-04-05T21:07:00.000+02:00

We just launched a considerable Easter promotion: see survey. Why? Well, because sales of Teamwork are often done together with a work reorganization, and hence tend to be done either during summer break, or at year's end or start. But this is quite uncomfortable in terms of cash flow, so a little push in an earlier buy, with the guarantee of getting free updates for several months, can help cash flowing more uniformly. At least, we hope!

P.S. It worked: we acquired interesting customers: several Europeans companies (Germany, Italy and Sweden always in the lead), including public utilities, an African university (finally Africa among the customers!), a group of U.S. "architects"...; a German university is now using it for its PM courses, and a group of developers from Vietnam is building some external additional modules... .

"Old" Europe software production

2007-03-31T13:20:00.000+02:00

Our recent trip to Silicon Valley was quite impressive, for the quality and number of companies located there, and for the enthusiasm and open-mindedness of the developers we met in SD West (in sharp contrast to a surrounding paranoid society affected by overruling, but that is another matter). Clearly it is easier to work and grow in IT there. I now reviewed our competitors locations, both from the Jolt finalist list, and as market leaders: they are all U.S.A. based, from North Carolina to California.

We are the only example in our category that shows that you can do it in Europe too, and get recognized in the U.S.; so Europeans, go and choose us!

Pietro Polsinelli

Teamwork wins the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award

2007-03-27T16:30:00.000+02:00

We got the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award for the Project Management category!!!

The Jolt winners were announced at SD West, in Santa Clara (CA), and we were there: it was a nice evening, the prizes were presented by Craig Newmark of Craigslist.

It is the first time that an Italian software product gets a Jolt. For Teamwork, it is a recognition of the quality of the work done, which will stimulate us in producing still better releases.

See all the winners:

http://www.joltawards.com/2007

Creating an ASP service

2007-03-15T16:02:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago we decided to offer Teamwork as a free-to-start and pay-to-have-more online service.

In order to do this, we had to meet three requirements:

1. make Teamwork's areas completely self sufficient, as every account would be an area on a unique, shared Teamwork instance

2. automate the free account limits verification -> "buy on PayPal" suggestion -> return to online service from PayPal with account activation

3. make Teamwork easier to begin with

We completed all three, set up a couple of fast servers, and are now on line. In 24 hours we had 145 new accounts, so the idea at least has some glamor to it. The dedicated servers for the moment answer really fast, so we keep finger crossed.

Point 3 is actually the hardest one; we introduced a new page, which will be included in next release, which should make it easier to start using Teamwork here's a screenshot:

You can see it yourself at http://online.twproject.com/applications/teamwork/createUserEnvironment.jsp

Does software development work management need specific tools?

2007-02-16T19:27:00.000+01:00

We've been producing software for several years, and since 2001, we've also supplied solutions for work management for teams (that is, a particular mixture of project management and groupware) to hundreds of companies. We've built a unified model for meeting this kind of problems, and though we always used Teamwork internally, we kept our application generic, so it could be applied to all office environments.

Now, does software development work management need specific tools? The question became more evident when I looked at our Jolt awards competitors in the project management category; I checked what they are doing, and they are all quite different from Teamwork (apart from being clearly inferior in usability, technology, and style ;-) ) in being focused in managing work for software development. There is nothing in Teamwork's core specifically done for developers; you can really fine tune your usage and environment, and given its wide scope, even select which modules to adopt; but how and what you manage depends on your organisational philosophy, more then on your productive activity. This is not by chance, but because IMEO (In My Experienced Opinion) the answer to the above question is no, software development work management does not need specific tools; it needs powerful and flexible tools, identical to those any computer aided production activity needs, such as accounting, financial analysis, document production, laboratories, or even spacecraft production, to cite a few of Teamwork 's customer activities. Developers have a tendency to consider their work a very special one, but actually any of the above activities needs structured projects, issue tracking, customers support (in a wide spectrum of "customer" notion), and so on.

A couple of examples:

"non specific software does not have the notion of release"
Any activity has tasks and milestones.

"a specific software can automatically record time spent on a project by watching what software the developer is using"
Well, if you really believe this stuff, and you are a project manager, your company is definitively in danger.

Actually, non being specific is a virtue of Teamwork, as considering the software development team just as a bunch of guys who should get productive like everybody else, can be a quite healthy consideration.

Pietro Polsinelli

Interview on Mokabyte

2007-02-15T09:36:00.000+01:00

Mokabyte, "the" monthly on Java in Italian, has published an interview to Roberto and myself, concerning Teamwork and the Jolt candidature. The interview is due to meeting Alberto Brandolini at JAOO, where we were the only Italians, and we found a shared interest for all that comes out in methodology and programming in Java. Then came the Jolt nomination, so he interviewed us.

Actually he is a really funny guy, and has a nice blog. Thank you Alberto!

Pietro Polsinelli

Teamwork and RSS

2007-01-29T17:01:00.000+01:00

The latest addition in Teamwork's list of features is the use of RSS feeds. Your news can now be deployed via a RSS feed to all team members who subscribe to the service, with all the advantages of RSS, such as using your chosen external news aggregator.
Moreover, besides setting up as many feeds as you want, you have one "implicit" channel where all the events you subscribed to and the messages sent to you are published.

In the picture you can see a Teamwork page displaying RSS news items, on the left, and Internet Explorer 7's internal aggregator showing the same RSS.

Massimiliano Ferroni

Back from OOP 2007 in Munich

2007-01-27T15:14:00.000+01:00

Roberto and myself just got back from OOP in Munich. We had a fair show, and managed to find really good German cooking :-)

While exposing as usual we did a lot of new developments and bug fixing, and got some nice ideas from the visitors; we had competent opinions, met a really nice guy from IBM (yes, really :-D), several bright developers (also girls!), and a bizarre but stimulating fellow from Siemens; a total of about 50 demos. A 3.1.3 version will be out soon!

It was an occasion for Roberto and me to reflect and discuss where to find our point of balance, between "groupware" (i.e. shared to-do's, boards, agenda, forum, portal features), project management, issue/bug track, document management and customer support; all who came to us reported the need, and we pointed out how limiting management to a specialised bug track leads to general unhappiness in the wider team, to which all agreed. Teamwork collects the different needs in one application, I believe quite maturely for what concerns the object model, and a little still to go for the interface, but we are almost there (I hope!).

All Germans we met spoke English very well, fortunately, as my scholastic German is by now almost useless for explaining (while I understand quite a bit). The size of the Messe expo area is amazing (you see only a bit in the picture); we went round it with our van, and it seemed never ending.

There were a lot of expositors, many selling really bizarre stuff, from Smalltalk development (never heard the news?) to "fast" UML (so what?), to miraculous testing tools (ever tried with a web application?). Anyway, I guess that diversity is a good thing in itself, as my father (a geneticist) always tells me.

Pietro Polsinelli

Jolt 2007 Excellence Awards finalist

2007-01-17T22:14:00.000+01:00

Astonished and confused, today we got the notification that Teamwork is a Jolt 2007 Excellence Awards finalist: http://www.joltawards.com/2007 .

The selection is quite serious, the few finalists (6 in our category) are chosen among hundreds of candidates, so we are really happy about this nomination.

The winners will be announced at SD West 2007, on March 21, Wednesday, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM. Flying to Santa Clara in March!

Review on Java Black Belt

2007-01-15T11:32:00.000+01:00

Java Black Belt (with several dans) John Rizzo has published a short history of their adoption of Teamwork:

http://www.javablackbelt.com/NewsDisplay.wwa

He associates only myself (Pietro) to Teamwork development, as I'm the person he's discussing with, but of course Teamwork is the result of a collective development effort, coordinated by Roberto and myself.

Discussing with John, we focused the need of a one-page editable task-tree page; Matteo Bicocchi already developed the Javascript and Ajax component, when back from Germany we'll integrate it in Teamwork.

Testing new Teamwork releases

2007-01-07T12:12:00.000+01:00

There are several popular/hype theories and beliefs spread in the JEE world which we don't subscribe to in our web development: notably MVC and the tags/xml world in interface constructions. A further diffused superstition is the belief in code-based testing, or building application tests by writing further code (many share this skepticism, for example see webtest.canoo.com).

But this does not mean we do not believe in testing, on the contrary, testing is crucial in releasing reliable applications. And as Teamwork is getting wider adoption, not breaking adopted versions with new releases is becoming crucial for the survival of our product.

We have used extensively hallway testing; for us, a test makes sense if it is not done by the developers, and is performed on the user interface, not on the code. This is particularly true in the case of a web application, where the interface support changes in time and is not uniquely determined. Moreover the application behavior can be quite different depending on the browser, operating system and database used. To test an application like Teamwork, can mean testing several combinations for each page, hence resulting in several thousand tests, multiplied to the number of platform/db combinations. So we needed to somehow persist the tests done, and to make it possible to run thousands of them by one-click. We first checked

1. httpunit, but it’s based on the idea of writing tests in code, discarded,

and

2. htmlunit and watij.com , which rely on the assumption that you can automate finding links on a page, but this was partly true several years ago, though incredibly hard, and is impossible in a contemporary application like Teamwork which may any time alter the DOM by creating a link, so this too was discarded.

Going our way.

There are many many other tools, but the problem is how to ease the pain of recording structured information over Http request, and our framework knows how to do this for its own applications. So we extended our in-house practical-in-the-extreme development platform with a web based test recording and playing framework.

Our tests have a web based management interface, support composition, and are stored through Hibernate persistence on a separate database.

You can create and refer to variables, you can write assertions using the beanshell scripting language - we used bsh instead of JDK 6' inner scripting framework as the latter does not yes support Java-like syntax and is a bit unstable.
You may even get more reliable releases now :-D

Here are a few screenshots of our tool:

Teamwork and technological updates

2006-12-29T14:28:00.000+01:00

Teamwork's best year so far is ending; we finally had a little time to breathe, so in this days we have been refining Teamwork interface and updating the underlying technology: now Teamwork runs fine on JDK 6, and on Hibernate 3.2. We also switched to c3p0 connection pool technology, and updated the Install4j to version 4. In a following post we will share our ideas concerning web interfaces and the novelties introduced by Ajax.

We have also first alphas of next release, with the Outlook synch module, which will surely be part of it, and a new testing framework; we will soon launch a "vote for features", as done for version 3, to fix the priorities.

In the meantime, Teamwork's customers are growing at good pace. Interesting is that the JavaBlackBelt community too is using Teamwork for their management.

Teamwork and web services

2006-12-07T15:57:00.000+01:00

We can now supply any Teamwork API through web services, by using Apache's Axis. Axis is surprisingly simple to use; we tested stubs from Java and Word's VBA, and works like a charm. You can satisfy wild needs, like having in Word the list of Teamwork's open tasks.

This can be particularly useful for Teamwork with workflow, and using web services to push and pull info on external services. We plan to give more visibility to the workflow suite in the next months, and how nicely it can work bundled with Teamwork.

JAOO's video - Teamwork included

2006-11-24T22:48:00.000+01:00

The JAOO 2006 video is on line at

http://blog.jaoo.dk/2006/11/jaoo_video.html

These guys do a really good job - and its not trivial. 1000 bizarre guys for three long days...

Microsoft Project import/export in Teamwork 3.1.0

2006-11-13T18:35:00.000+01:00

As you can see below, we are almost done with MS Project import/export. Now, this will satisfy those that use MS Project basically as a Gantt-drawing tool. MS Project power users (supposing there is such a used-to-pain being :-) ), will never be satisfied, as the two application have a deeply different model; same for Teamwork power users (there are many). This functionality can be of use also for those who are forced to have a MS Project output for corporate and/or certification purposes (I know people that use Teamwork and export to MS Project only to send the project structure to review staff).

In the course of this development, we introduced the duration concept, which empowers tasks scheduling with a new dimension; a huge task tree can be set using durations, and the entire tree dates will depend only on a single entry point, which can be shifted in time.

We use the nice API of http://mpxj.sourceforge.net .

One of Teamwork's Gantt views.

Select the export function.

Here you find Teamwork's resources and assignments in MS Project.

Scheduling done in Teamwork, gets exported exactly as it was.

Microsoft Project is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

SQL Injection Bug

2006-11-01T21:43:00.000+01:00

If you've seen "What's a SQL Injection Bug?": well, we were aware of the bug, and we found several sites in which we could enter the "reserved" page using it. Our software is safe, of course: we use only parameterized statements.

3.1: systemic improvements

2006-10-27T21:13:00.000+02:00

Among the almost a hundred improvements done for the forthcoming version 3.1 of Teamwork, there are several "systemic" ones.
Like we found that many users never set Tomcat memory settings after trial; as Teamwork by default ran into Tomcat's minimal memory space (64MB), this led many to problems. So now it uses by default a 128MB space, and its documented in the install PDF how to set and modify this.
Teamwork now supports schema evolution, and a bug concerning Oracle schema update has been fixed.
We also found that under Linux there were cases when Teamwork was launched by a JDK 4 Java instance, which led to problems; this too is already fixed.

There is also a new page in Teamwork, "system check", that reports the system license, database, memory, version and scheduling state, giving the administrator the overall situation at a glance. There is a "check for updates function".

We mean to release 3.1 as a very stable version; hence we are being really very very careful in releasing an application highly compatible with the most diverse environments and situations.

Many of these improvements come from (invaluable) user feedback; thanks for that, and keep posting errors (maybe with your email, so we can notify you of the fix), observations, suggestions and sending e-mails.

Teamwork at JAOO 2006

2006-10-12T14:22:00.001+02:00

Here is Teamwork stand at JAOO 2006. Among IBM, SUN, Google... it gave a funny feeling.

A powerpoint of our "solution presentation" is downloadable from JAOO's site for those who have a JAOO login. The presentation expands this theme.

JAOO is a very well organized developer's conference, and Aarhus a nice place to visit.

This is the beautiful boy's statue at Aarhus contemporary art museum, which is just in front of the Expo. Actually if had seen it already at the Venice Biennale two years ago, in a completely different context, where the statue fit exactly with the room where it was placed.

I also bought a Peter Rabbit book in Danish for my daughter. Fortunately she can't read yet :-)

We did 44 demos at our booth; we asked every single person whether they were a Java developer using Hibernate: 98% of positive answers; in this sense it is likely true that Teamwork is the easiest application out there for integration with an existing IT infrastructure: everybody is using Hibernate, so it will be easy to link to Teamwork.

Teamwork ready for scrumming

2006-09-28T15:30:00.000+02:00

Teamwork 3.1 (which we are using internally and will demo at JAOO) will come our ready for SCRUM:

The custom SCRUM home

The SCRUM sprint wizard

The SCRUM team

A burn-down chart

To see the chart, on any task editor go to Edit -> Issue Charts.

Our first expo: in London

2006-09-27T09:18:00.001+02:00

Here we are at "Project Challenge 2006" in Olympia (London). We had 300 contacts and made over 50 demos in two days, more then we had done in a year!

People liked our stand, "paperwork" (our graphical material) and in particular our orange shoes; we'll see whether they liked the app...

Teamwork feedback and competitors: thanks!

2006-09-09T16:59:00.000+02:00

When a few weeks ago I requested on Teamwork's mailing list and on the forum for some feedback, I had no idea whether I would get any answer. Actually, the first day I got only one answer, which ran more or less “We don’t use it and we are happy about it”. So I wondered whether it was a good idea. But after a few days, feedback started coming in, ranging between fans saying that it is perfect as it is, to constructive criticism. And it keeps coming and coming. Thanks!
You know why it took a few days to start? Because the feedback we get is highly structured: people are sending us detailed excel charts with features, issues, and comparisons, discussed in group meetings. Users of structured software have refined interactions :-)

Among all this feedback, my dear friend Massimo Iacolare, a new born micro-ISV entrepreneur (when is your website coming up Massimo?), pointed to me to these links:

http://www.shmula.com/158/focus-on-the-customer
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/instore_good_or_athome_good.php

where it is briefly stated the need of "simple" and very specialized software, and that features look good in stores but not when using the apps.

Well, what I can say is that Teamwork is surely good at home; for the good at the store, we’re working on it: we’re "Crossing the chasm"" (for a contextual perspective see the beautiful "Eric Sink on the Business of Software").

Its good at home because first of all the model is good. Differences in interface reflect also differences in articulation of the underlying model; and my claim is that our competitors (in particular those reviewed in the previous posts) have simplistic models. On the 37signals post I found this brutal comment:

Sebhelyesfarku 06 Sep 06
I like feature packed products. I’m not retarded like average consumers.

Well, this is sort of funny, but I am not saying this. A user evaluating work management software can easily confuse the fact that we have to render a complex model, with feature bloating. The fact that Teamwork’s interface is more complex then that of some of its supposed competitors is not due to feature bloat, but to the articulation of the concepts involved. Actually, our powerful interfaces are a sign of health.

Let’s consider security problems for even a medium-small company, say with a hundred employees. I bet that no one can find a single example of such a company where everyone can see all the information floating in the company in the IT structure. But more: there will always be local exceptions to a simple role-based security model, because there will always turn up a particular project that has its own security

Teamwork 2 had a role based security model, further refined by “areas”, which were a way of completely separating say departments, in which the roles could be distributed. There could be users having different roles in different areas. But, as in all fundamentally role-based models, once you had a role, you would have it in the entire area; so once you could read a task in say production, you cold read all tasks in production. So users complained again and again that they wanted a more fine grained security, as fine grained as a single task. And notice that this has to scale with respect to the numbers of projects, users and roles, for example when you do a search, so you have to express this in HQL (or equivalently, in SQL) in order to performant instead of navigating the objects, and you have to comply to the security model, which is non trivial. But for version 3, by leveraging Roberto’s intuition of giving a role weight to assignments, we got all we had with version 2, plus fine grained security; and teams and structured work for free, too.

All competitors I’ve seen so far don’t even reach Teamwork 2’s security model. And any (Team) work management application that doesn’t solve the case of exceptions, simply cannot work. Full stop.

So you must have a complex model, covering 100% of cases. What distinguishes a good model from a bad one is how it covers limit cases. Assuming that your model covers all above, and more, then we can talk about the interface ergonomics; but applications with a wrong model, will not fit the real world, however pretty their interface may be.

Also the reasoning of some competitors for separating applications is leaky. How could you have distinct applications for security and work management? And users are supposed to jump from one application to the other? Not very user friendly.

Interfaces for such applications cannot be simple; but they can be comfortable. And in Teamwork we have and are working hard on this (a page dedicated to “comfort” features of Teamwork 3 will appear soon on the web site). From release 3.0.0 to 3.0.6 the interface has been improved in hundreds of places, but the model in unchanged.
We are working today on showing how to use Teamwork to support SCRUM methodology; even if we studied SCRUM last week, we are almost done implementing it and the model is fully compatible with it.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope our ideas are clearer now. Pietro

Beyond Teamwork 3.0.X series

2006-09-07T21:10:00.000+02:00

What are we preparing for Teamwork future?

First of all we have collected about 200 feature request and bugs since the release of 3.0.0, of which with the 3.0.1-3.0.6 releases we fixed almost all bugs (more then 50) and added several features.

There should be another 3.0.X release with more fixes and a SCRUM module coming soon, together with a documentation video.

For the next major release, considering also users feedback, for the moment we plan:

- MS Exchange server integration
- file server native security integration
- MS project import/export
- services (like rooms) allocation in time with graphical interface
- PDF versions of all print pages
- expansion of the CMS part, with also RSS feeds of news
- text file contacts import
- more paper documentation

Hopes for release are in first quarter, 2007.

Another one: Teamworklive, and fashion in web applications

2006-09-06T17:32:00.000+02:00

I've taken a look at www.teamworklive. com. Little to say here: seems more a tool to set up a community, than anything related to managing work. Its crammed with Ajax, everything moves, reloads… JUST KEEP STILL for a second!
And the object model below? Seems rough, un-engineered stuff: no trees…

Developing like this is a bit like following fashion; but ergonomics has nothing to do with fashion. Like now so many new web applications, they feature big fonts; a few years ago fashion was small fonts. Fonts used in forms should be monospaced, and in display they should be small enough to be readable and transmit as much information as possible on the page. Web applications should be useful in work, not paged like a fashion magazine.

For a dive into nonsense, such applications have RSS subscriptions everywhere: how can a secured, profiled application supply data as RSS, with no authentication? Teamwork will provide company news as RSS; but to provide a task content as RSS seems bizarre.

Pietro

Some impressions on Basecamp

2006-09-06T10:54:00.000+02:00

Teamwork’s competitors
By reviewing Teamwork’s competitors, the only one that seems currently relevant is Basecamp (BC), www.basecamphq. com. It seems relevant to me because it starts with a seemingly similar philosophy:

“Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, or reports, they fail from a lack of communication and collaboration. Basecamp makes it simple to communicate and collaborate on projects”
(from BC’s home page)

We see that we target the same market; we cover a distinct segmentation (BC is for personal – or at most 2,3 people use, Teamwork is for companies), but we will compete anyway. Teamwork covers a much wider set of features; but let’s forget this and compare the two on what they seemingly share.

Testing
After login (“enter” does not move you in the password field, as you would expect), you get in and you see that the interface is inspired by paper layouts. The object model is a simple (simplistic?) view of projects, where there are no subprojects.

The notion of subtask is absent, because it is meant to be dealt with by the "milestone" notion. But milestones are related only linearly, in time; no parallel tasks are possible; how can this model reality?

Don’t even think of doing a filter on search; actually, we couldn’t find almost anything by searching.

Your to-do list can be multiple; it’s funny, because the environment is de-structured, so the simplest features are over-structured.

A typical layout is this:

How could this layout scale? There don't seem to be a search for persons. Companies cannot be organized; there are no departments. Its like moving across a book, where all information is always all printed. But it becomes quickly an A2-sized book, and hence cumbersome to use.

Everything is built having in mind a limited set of data. Well, even a microscopic company like Open Lab has in few years created over a thousand tasks and subtasks, 3000 issues and so on. It is unthinkable to manage this kind of data in the BC interface. Generally I feel like there is a dimension missing. Like Lewis Carroll's flatland, moving around in BC is a problem; in Teamwork there are always the tools to get everywhere else fast.

The subscriptions tab is right in the middle of your management links; but it refers to BC subscriptions! Actually, advertising is everywhere, and is a bother.

In BC, ease of use is got by having software that does little, not by trying to make a powerful program easy to learn. Let’s put something clear: there is nothing wrong in having to learn how to use an application. Do you recall the first time you tried to use Excel? Well, it took some time. Things should be simplified, but not beyond the nature of the problem at hand. By over simplifying the matter at hand, you get an over simplified interface, but that’s not exactly a bright solution. This reminds me the evolution of TV media, where its target gets lower and lower, actively reducing the intelligence of users (I got rid of my TV long ago).

Actually, the fact that it runs in ASP is presented as a feature, but it is a necessity, given the current poor integration capacities of Ruby. We, on Java and Hibernate, have maximized our IT integration capacity.

Minor things
- graphs are not clickable
- accented characters are not sent properly by mail (lack Unicode or UTF-8 support).
- like Teamwork, but even if it is a much simplified environment, and runs on the supplier server, is not exempt from exceptions:

- It is natural for several users to post different posts on a board at the same time; here it is impossible

(and take care as usual to not get into an advertisement page).

Conclusion
They have buzz on their side, which pushes them on even without quality; we have only quality to help us. We’ll see who wins.

Pietro

Teamwork at Project Challenge 2006

2006-09-01T21:04:00.000+02:00

We are working intensely in these days to get ready for the London Expo for September 19.

This is one of the plans for the stand. We even have a Maya 3D structure for it! Info on the expo at http://www.projchallenge.com.

Teamwork at JAOO 2006

2006-09-01T20:14:00.000+02:00

Among the attempts to set up a "expo" promotion campaign, I contacted in August the EOS team, which organizes

JAOO, one of the world's most important developers conferences.

The guys of EOS have been incredibly helpful, in particular Mai, and they've become.. Teamwork's users!

We will participate to JAOO as exhibitors. See the details of JAOO at http://www.jaoo.dk.

Teamwork videos behind the scenes

2006-08-02T18:07:00.000+02:00

We've published a little behind the scenes video:
http://dl.open-lab.com/videos/behind.htm

I guess that it's fun only for us :-)

Teamwork interface translations

2006-06-29T16:38:00.000+02:00

We are very happy to have the German and French translations of the interface (release 3.0.2). Of course any user can further customize it simply through the web interface!

Teamwork 3 on TheServerSide

2006-06-09T14:21:00.000+02:00

Strangely for an industry news, Teamwork release made it to TSS'home. This caused a huge amount of visits to our sites. Thanks TSS!

Teamwork 3.0 is ready: thanks

2006-06-06T09:00:00.000+02:00

I am totally happy (and the glass from the Spumante bottle that we've just opened helps) that we released Teamwork 3 in time, and with a gorgeous set of features.

I believe that we have followed all the ideals to which we agreed in preparing release; some of these are:

- to make it easy to start using it
- to make the interface easy to use
- to give a more powerful model
- to document it through videos
- to listen to users feedback
- to simplify the use of security
- to produce interactive reports
- to keep teamwork compatible with all server and databases
- to simplify installation

Crucial in this achievement has been the contribution of Roberto Bicchierai, whose legendarily wide expertise made us build a strong backbone as model (and also some beautiful tattoos). In detail, the formidable Open Lab team: Afra Balletta, Roberto Bicchierai, Matteo Bicocchi, Irina Branovic, Ilaria Di Gaeta, Caterina Feroci, Massimiliano Ferroni, Amélie Ngantcha, Laura Mirri, Giuseppe Panzarella, Matteo Rossi, Carlo Zoli, and myself, Pietro Polsinelli.

Some people who have helped us in the past: Allegra Bicocchi, Andrea Costantinis, Ezio Manetti, Giorgio Medina, Nicola Ponzeveroni, Teresa Di Viesti. Some users that gave most valuable feedback: Stefano Besseghini, William Ho, Brendan Boyle, Federico Rapi, Keith Page, Mauro Manetti, Tommaso Pecchioli, Massimo Iacolare, Alessandro Veracchi.

Technically, we owe mostly to Gavin King's creation, Hibernate, and to Joel Spolsky's writings and links on user interfaces, among many, many others.

To all of you my deepest thanks for making my fixed obsession come true and maybe become something useful.

Looking at competitors: @Task

2006-05-31T11:22:00.000+02:00

Note: this post expresses the personal opinion of Pietro Polsinelli. The opinions expressed may be highly biased, but told with no hypocrisy, as is customary in blogs.

Solicited by an evaluator, I took a look at one of our competitors: the @Task application. (call it @T from now on).

The first unconfortable thing is that on the site there is no hand on demo. So I had to enrol just to look at the flash “presentation” (strange), which gives little information, apart from many big words. So I also read all the PDF on the site, and looked the screenshots.

Differences of power

Looking at the screenshots, their task model seems simple minded; in lists, the search filters seem poor, considering those in Teamwork, which allow QBE and its combinations.

The sentence (from the site) "Create Access level, Company, Project, User" seems symptomatic of @T not being really role-based, but again with "hard-coded" security. Permissions are set directly on the task, and not through assignments: Teamwork is far more flexible on this.

There does not seem to be any period events management. The agenda interface seems less user friendly than that of Teamwork; again it seems to have only a fraction of the power of Teamwork schedule model. Teamwork’s skins are also prettier.

Document management doesn’t seem to integrate with the file system as Teamwork's file storages.

There is an underlying difference of approach: take the notion of “approval”: can this be met by introducing simply a field with a user who approves? This is an incredibly simplistic approach: approval can be as complex as a task; what if more then ONE signature is necessary? It is much better to have a dependency from an approval task, or even more, to connect the task to a workflow definition which captures also approval.

Another example: to customize pages, we included a complete content-management system in Teamwork 3: I strongly doubt that @T has this power; our portal features are hard to beat.

More generally @T "feels" a "hard-coded" application. It is not clear from the documentation if it supports arbitrarily deep task and resource trees (Teamwork does indeed).

A difference in modelling power can have big consequences in time; what can be trivial in a general model, can be impossible in a restricted one.

Some ideas seem plainly wrong like having "Profitability reports": profitability is so subject to variations between companies and even between projects that it can be only evaluated by having the task give you the plain costs; only a human with the costs in hand can evaluate the real profitability.

It is probably a difference of basic philosophy: @T is focused on standards, Teamwork on modelling power.

Application integration

1) For application integration, the fact that Teamwork is Hibernate based, an open and by now dominant technology, is surely a plus. @T seems to support natively only

* Oracle,
* Microsoft SQL Server 2000
* MySQL

while Teamwork supports

* Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g
* DB2 7.1, 7.2, 8.1
* Microsoft SQL Server 2000
* Sybase 12.5 (JConnect 5.5)
* MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0
* PostgreSQL 7.1.2, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1
* TimesTen 5.1
* HypersonicSQL 1.61, 1.7.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.3, 1.8
* SAP DB 7.3
* Apache Derby
* HP NonStop SQL/MX 2.0 (requires Dialect from HP)
* Firebird (1.5 with JayBird 1.01 tested)
* FrontBase
* Informix
* Ingres
* Interbase (6.0.1 tested)
* Mckoi SQL
* Pointbase Embedded (4.3 tested)
* Progress 9
* Microsoft Access version from 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2002, to 2003 (requires Dialect from HXTT)
* Corel Paradox version from 3.0, 3.5, 4.x, 5.x, 7.x to 11.x (requires Dialect from HXTT)
* flat text , CSV file, TSV file, fixed-length, and variable-length binary file (requires Dialect from HXTT)
* Xbase database (dbase, Visual DBASE, SIx Driver, SoftC, Codebase, Clipper, Foxbase, Foxpro, VFP(3.0,5.0,7.0,8.0,9.0, 10), xHarbour, Halcyon, Apollo, Goldmine, and BDE) (requires Dialect from HXTT)

:-D

2) Teamwork can be integrated with a real workflow engine (JBPM)

3) No trace of sources of @T to be found; Teamwork’s persistent model is on Sourceforge.

Finally

The impression from the website is that @T is a quite poor application, but its few points are presented and stressed again and again (again lack of live demo suggests this), so it has a strong commercial support.

We could make a deal with our customers: we'll reproduce any report that @T does in Teamwork for free, if it is compatible with the data model.

Last but not least, we are very competitive on price:

@T: $395/User plus a 20 percent annual maintenance and upgrade fee
vs.
Teamwork: 10Euro/User with no expiry

Hence, imho, we cost less, and give more.

Video support material

2006-05-30T18:54:00.000+02:00

In our videos we create a sample publishing company, "International Geographic". Here you see the graphical material created for it.

Some Teamwork 3 numbers

2006-05-30T10:23:00.000+02:00

4 graphic designers
7 beta testers
10 developers
11 companies bought it before it was out
100 subscribers from Freshmeat
318 issues closed
366 early access members
969 evaluation requests
1.091 enrolled on forum
1.229 posts on the forum
4.000 worklog hours
10.000 builds
28.000 downloads of version 2
99.751 sessions on the forum
Uncountably many discussions of Pietro and Roberto ..

Now the only number missing is.. how many will we sell ??

Teamwork dashboard

2006-05-15T20:38:00.000+02:00

Dashboard functionalities made it for the final: one can customize the home through simple drag and drop on the browser, choosing among several powerful active parts.

We just deployed this feature to the Open lab team, and it's being an immediate success. I've never seen so many different Teamworks!

Meeting in Florence

2006-05-10T11:30:00.000+02:00

We've had an interesting reunion on how to promote Teamwork in the eve of version 3 release. Among other things, we will host a Teamwork' seminar in Florence in September (2006), where we plan to speak about:

Advanced security settings

Creating custum forms and reports

Creating a custom enterprise dashboard

The place will be San Gallo Palace, a beautiful hotel at walk distance from center town.

Teamwork 3 sections and features are done

2006-04-30T15:52:00.000+02:00

We made it: teamwork 3 as an application is finished. It took about 4000 hours of development, including programming, design, promoting and supporting it (thanks to Teamwork, we can track this wery well).

In this two years we tried to develop as much as culturally as well as from the development point of view. We studied interface design, web application architecture, project management culture, workgroup software, calendar tools, and many other stuff.

Some readings and links that were important:

JBlooming framework www.jblooming.org .
Jbpm http://www.jbpm.org/
Hibernate www.hibernate.org
Gavin King, Christian Bauer, Hibernate in Action: Practical Object/Relational Mapping, Manning, 2004
JetBrain’s Intellij www.intellij.com
Microsoft Project interoperability http://mpxj.sourceforge.net
Erik Hatcher and Otis Gospodnetić, Lucene in Action, Mannings 2004
Joel Spolsky, User Interface Design for Programmers, Apress, 2001
Joel on software: www.joelonsoftware.com
Bruce A. Tate, Beyond Java, OReilly, 2005
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, Gower Publishing Limited, 2004
Edward M. Reingold, Nachum Dershowitz, Calendrical Calculations,Cambridge University Press, 2001

Teawork's blog

2006-04-27T21:27:00.000+02:00

I've been posting on teamwork for quite a while on my blog, at ppolsinelli.blogspot.com. But Teamwork deserves a blog for itself.

We are on the eve of the most important release of Teamwork, 3.0. We will blog about what we are doing and how we progress in this crucial phase, about our choices, and the market and community response.

Have fun,

Pietro Polsinelli