PRONOVIX

Yesterday I saw this post with a video on the new P2 theme for Wordpress and how Automattic* is using that as a real time microblog like tool for status updates in their company. And it got me thinking...

Today Peter activated his brand new Graphmind feature on our intranet/extranet that we built with Open Atrium. The feature adds: a tab to the features menu in group spaces; a view page with the mindmaps in the active group space and a button to create new mindmaps. The feature might be quite basic, but the possibilities are mind-boggling.

Besides of the obvious use cases such as:

• taking notes online

When we first heard about Open Atrium we realized that this had the potential to seriously reduce the maintenance overhead we had on our project management platform.

So as many other Drupal shops we decided to build ourselves a new extranet in Open Atrium.

Some time ago we blogged about Bubbletimer, a module for tracking time spent on projects. Peter Arato, the module's author now also built 2 features that integrates it with Open Atrium:

Time Managment adds a tab on the user space with the Bubbletimer form

If you ever wrote a specification, you've come across the following problem: Once you finally built your spec you need to cut it into feature-tickets, spec units that you can properly follow in your project management system. This basically duplicates your information, in a fluent text and a ticket version. It's a lot of extra work and worst of all it disconnects your specification from your project management system.

In most cases this means that from that point on, the written document is dead: the fluid text version will never be rewritten. A recipe for a communication disaster.

Anybody who ever filled in time sheets knows what a pain it can be. Worse, any ticket based time tracking implies that you should be doing productive work at all times. We all know that's not true...
Here's what's wrong with the classical time sheets approach:

• It requires you to interrupt your activities
• Since it's not integrated in all aspects of your workflow you often forget about them
• It's a lot of extra work to provide context to the time submission
• Tracking only happens for “billable” items