Re: [Planner Dev] Resource feedback

[Lincoln Phipps <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

Alvaro ,

Was thinking about this too and wondered if a possible
communication path would be through use of Flexible Offline
Message Retrieval (http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0013.html )
via Jabber.

Why not make the project a service and then have end users
"talk" to it. When the service is offline (i.e. Planner is not
open and live) then any user status message would be queued
so that when the project manager came back then they would be
able to sync the local Planner copy.

Same applies to resources getting latest project status; they
too could get their offline messages telling them of the
latest tasks as a message push from the Project manager via
their jabber-aware Planner.

This also introduces the idea that Planner could have a
live Jabber presence and have stuff updated in real-time
via some sort of async messages. This would be way more
fun than boring old email.

Given Imendio also happens to provide Loadmouth ...which is
written in 'C', it could be a good mix.

Rgds,
Lincoln.

 Alvaro del Castillo wrote:
> Hi!
>
> First of all, the target of this email is to share some needed features
> and ideas to implement them. I plan to find time to work on it.
>
> I know we have had long discussions in the past about how the resources
> of a project should feedback the project manager in order the schedule
> for the project could be updated. 
>
> I have been talking with a mate in the work that is working scheduling
> projects (with MS Project for now) as me and we have started to have a
> clear vision of a minimal implementation that we need.
>
>
> 				     >	Resource 1
>
>
> 				     >	Resource 2
>
> 	Project Manager --> Planner
> 				     >	Resource 3
>
> 					..........
> 					
> 				     >	Resource n
>
>
> The project manager once the schedule is completed wants to communicate
> it to the resources. Currently we have the export as HTML report and it
> is a nice way to do it, but what we really need is a individual report
> per resource in order each resource doesn't get confused with the
> complete and normally complex schedule of the project.
>
> So the first thing we need is to improve a bit how to communicate the
> individual schedule to the resources, maybe with a new style sheet that
> creates a individual page per resource.
>
> Once a resources has its own view of the schedule she can easily report
> feedback about the progress on her tasks using this view. It could be
> ideal that the per resource report include a little GUI in order the
> resource can feedback about the completion status of the work.
>
> A quick idea could be to offer the report as a HTML page, like the
> actual HTML complete schedule report, with a button to indicate the
> completion of a task.
>
> Once a user hits the button a CGI (I think we have had a CGI in the past
> in MrProject) could be invoked that updates the schedule in Planner
> obtaining a lock against the planner file before modifying it.
>
> Currently planner is designed as a single user application but with a
> very basic blocking system using lock files, we can have a good
> concurrent control system.
>
> With this simple schema we start to give Planner feedback about
> execution and I feel it will be a more useful tool for managing the
> execution of projects.
>
> Any ideas or comments will be very welcomed. I will rethink a bit all
> the design before starting to code anything.
>
> Cheers
>
>
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