Re: [Evolution] Project Management with Evolution

[Al Hooton <al hootons org>]

On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 15:57, Jesse Pretorius wrote:
> I'm now thinking that a small extension could be made to task management
> to make it show up in the calendar (along with appointments) like a
> Gantt chart. Essentially what would need to happen is that start and end
> dates would need to be set per task.

<snip>

        This is a very cool idea, and something that at least one person in the
world would use constantly (me...  8^)=  ).

        My fear with something like this would be the non-stop pressure to keep
growing it in to a full-fledged project management tool.  Oh, just one
more feature here, one more feature there, etc.  Also, there are very
capable open-source tools out there already for task
management/scheduling all the way up through full project management. 
With this in mind, here's a slightly different approach to your
suggestion.

        Keep the display/functionality that is actually within Evo itself
fairly simple, as in your first-stage idea.  However, make this stuff in
Evo essentially a presentation layer on top of a full-functionality
open-source project management tool under the hood.  For folks that just
want the simple functionality, this is invisible, or maybe the
underlying tool isn't required at all.  For folks that want more
comprehensive project management functionality, they can use the
underlying tool when necessary to do the hard stuff, but still have a
very convenient way to display and make simple changes to their project
plan right within Evo, which is what they would do most of the time.

        Nothing the user sees would be much different from all your ideas,
there would just be a different engine under the hood driving most of
the functionality.  Hopefully, one of the existing open source project
management tools could be turned in to this engine without a huge amount
of work.

-Al