Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Project management by e-mail
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
and released since version 3.2.5.
Labels: Java Outlook ICalendar Agenda TeamworkTalk, Project management by e-mail, Teamwork by e-mail, TeamworkTalk
Monday, April 30, 2007
Teamwork and ICalendar/Outlook integration
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.
Labels: Java Outlook ICalendar Agenda TeamworkTalk
