Discussing changes

From No3wiki

From No3wiki

Ideas by Dominic:

• Add onsite?, billable? attribute to Effort. For our billing records.

Pixtur: What do you mean with onsite?

Djwmarks: We have different billing rates depending on the location of a task. If the task is performed at a client's site it costs more than if it is performed at our Office. That is why we need to be able to track location.

Pixtur: Ahh, I see. Ok, understood but until lots of other users request this feature it will probably not become a part of the main release.

• Add job_number attribute to Task. For billing integration.

Pixtur: would this be similar to a ticket number? Maybe we just could use the task-id for this? But this could be very high numbers and it cannot be changed.

Djwmarks: In our case, and I imagine most others, the job will exist long before any tasks get created. Additionally there will often be multiple tasks for a job.

Pixtur: This point needs some clarification! What makes a "job" different from a "folder"-task or a "project"? Can the job_number be created and used by streber or must it be editable?

• Add search by job_number.

Pixtur: Using the task-id for this would be very easy. Djwmarks: See above.

• Add invoice_number, invoiced? attributes to a project for billing integration.

Pixtur: For this I would suggest the following:

• • Each project may have a list of invoicings
  • each effort can be sorted to ONE invoicing

Djwmarks: We have projects which involve multiple organisations. It could be that we would have multiple invoices going to different organisations for a single effort. Pixtur: Ups. Never thought about this problem... Join tables are evil. I can understand your request but it would make the implementation invoicing much more difficult. We should collect more ideas to this problem. I somehow think this is "dirty" and it would be better to book one effort for each client (or duplicate the effort). I believe that having a concept like "one effort can only billed once" is a much better approach. So you always can say, if it has been paid or not.

Maybe jmz has a thought about this...

• Add search by invoice_number / invoiced?

Pixtur:invoice-number is just a string-field and can be fulltext searched like all other text-fields

• Add work_rate to Person and a work_rate override for specific combinations of Person and Company objects, again for billing.

Pixtur: read jmz's comments on this. I suggest a rate for a person, that can be overwritten by a rate for a task. So if an effort it booked for a task: 1st look for rate of task, 2nd look for persons rate in project.

Djwmarks: That sounds fine to me.

• Automatic query of Companies from our CRM system (which stores its database in MSSQL Server)

Pixtur: sounds interessting although I have no idea where to add this feature. Sooner or later we will add some xml-import/export features which might provide a more flexible solution for synchronisation.

Djwmarks: I'm not sure how this will be implemented here yet. I imagine for speed of development I will write a VBScript/PHP script which can be run periodically to synchronise the databases. It is not ideal but I have significant time pressure to get our system online.

• Allow an Effort to belong to more than one Task/Project.

Pixtur: I personally don't thing this is necessary. I will make the database much more complex and hierarchical tasks could provide a work around in most situations. Adding this feature requires a additional join-table, a new object and some additional steps in the new,edit,submit pages. Task assignment was a similar (but very important feature). If you search the code for for assignment, you will see the complexity.

Djwmarks: Hmm. This will indeed increase the level of complexity. Unfortunately this is an essential feature for us. The company I work for primarily serves large private and public sector organisations where it is actually rare to have a single pair of organisations involved in any thing. We will potentially have 10, 20 organisations involved in really large projects. I'll have to look into this myself in detail which I have not done yet.

Pixtur: This sounds like a comment on "several companies per project" which is still low priority but implemented much more easily. It also makes some sort of sense, because there is no workaround for this.

• Allow a Project to belong to more than one Company.

Pixtur: Actually the ideas sounds good. But there are a lot of details here. E.g. which address to use for invoices, etc. I would thing this is a low priority feature with extreme complexity.

• Automatic query of Persons in our Company via Active Directory (LDAP).

Pixtur: sounds very interessting. I don't have an idea who this works, but it sounds interessting. Djwmarks: The async approrach is pretty easy, where you query Active Directory and write the appropriate info into MySQL. Doing this "live" is a little harder. As I have to do this quickly I'll probably implement this async.

• Extend Person Calendar view to allow a single date to a single page out output, and make it browseable by date.

Pixtur: confirmed. A calendar is a must. Djwmarks: Great.

• Reports on Project and Person activity. These are being produced using VBScripts which query the MySQL Db, process the data a little and format reports in Microsoft Word & Excel format. This will allow the creation of a breakdown report for either a Project or a Person between two points in time.

Pixtur: Maybe combining strebers "filters" might provide a much easier solution for this. Of cause you can directly access the database, but sooner or later we need a sophisticated report feature inside streber...