ProjectLog Features

ProjectLog was initially developed ad-hoc by an IT company for in-house project management and to communicate project progress to customers. However while ProjectLog was indeed useful for both ourselves, our customers and our partners, we could not help already early on to think that ProjectLog could be useful for everybody. We started to rethink the design, how we could retain the proven benefits of the early system and at the same time make them available for everybody. This process have resulted in many ideas, however 2 features really set ProjectLog apart :

Every use owns his own fully featured project management system

Then every user owns his own fully featured project management system, it means that an organization eg. a company is build up of independent users however associated with said organization. From the perspective of the organization, it is just like any project management system with users, however from the perspective of the user, the organization is just one of possibly many organizations to which he is associated.

Curriculum exposure

An organization can choose to public expose project experience and associated users qualifications. These experiences can then be searched by other organization in need of such qualifications, effectively making ProjectLog a qualification broker system allowing organizations to find suppliers within ProjectLog and tie them directly to projects.

Main standard features

Calendar

The ProjectLog Calendar is integrated with projects & tasks. Dates can be created, edited, drag&drop moved and deleted from within the calendar interface. Dates can have categories, resources, descriptions and have a full user accessiblity system. The calendar can in addition be filtered on many different parameters like accounts, organizations, projects, users & categories.

Timelines

Gantt Charts

Hierachical project list

Hierarchical project list allows for better organization of projects. Say for a customer you have a project that really consist of multiple projects. We have that kind of projects all the time, eg. a customer have multiple IT systems that all needs to be maintained. With ProjectLog you just create a project called Systems Maintance and for each system you create a sub project.

Hierarchical task lists

Hierarchical task list allows for much better organization of tasks as well as indirect assignments & status changes (which make user filters a lot more powerful in case of lazy task assigning). First a project can have multiple task lists allowing for the first level of grouping of tasks, eg. Maintenance, New Features & Errors and because each list can be hierarchical, tasks can be further grouped ad infinitum

Google Docs integration

Many of our own customers and even our own employees like to use Google Docs for ad-hoc project descriptions and task lists, therefore ProjectLog allows to attach Google Docs to projects & tasks. While ProjectLog indeed support all aspects of project management, we don't want to force everyone to use ProjectLog, if some users are comfortable with using eg. Google Docs, we allow the project manager to acknowledge that and associate these external resources.

Dialog based work process

To make the work process faster, ProjectLog keeps most of the users time on dashboard using dialogs and dynamic data loading to build interfaces for manipulate data, this results in a streamlined and very responsive work flow.

Overview Screen

Overview screen consists of 3 panels :

  • Project List

    : Related projects are easily grouped and filtered, eg. on customers and/or statuses and/or many more.

  • Tasks

    : For a selected project you can have multiple named task lists each list being a hierarchy.

  • Task Details

    : While lot of task properties can be handled directly in the task lists, Task Details allows you a free style text editor on any task as well as attachments of resources.

User Monitor

Powerful real-time user monitoring : see what task employees, consultance or customers are working on right now and for how long time. Search any user any day to see what tasks the user was working on at what time.

Chat

In-system chat secures talked about is documentet in the system. Chat messages can be attached documents (drag&drop directly from filesystem), images, urls all searchable together with text messages.

Projects

Adding a new Project is as easy as clicking the Add-button and write the project name. However if you cannot use the default project settings inherited down through parent levels (System -> Account -> Organization) settings, you can configure you own for this particular project.

Tasks

For each Project you can add multiple task lists each task list is hierarchical (though flat and latest views exists as well). Task lists can be filtered on several properties, eg. who the task is assigned or priority or status. In addition tasks have attached resources and event timelines (next event showing up in the task list).

Tasks & any task sub-hierarchy can be moved around using drag&drop. Task lists themselves can be ordered using drag&drop and task lists can be archived (instead of deleting old lists, you may want to archive them for reference).

TimeOff

Employees can request TimeOff like sick, vacation, errand & other and select from a predefined list of managers to grant/deny the request. You decide if the request requires a grant, eg. typically sickness would not. If granted or if not require granting, the request will automatically submit to calendar and can can even be linked to specific calendar event types. The manager can choose to publish TimeOff requests onto external linked peoples calendars, eg. a customer that have contact with that employee.

ClockIn

Semi-automatic web-based clock-in system allowing employees to manually clock-in or -out or to automatically clock-in and/or -out then logging in & out to Projectlog (only first login and last logout counts then configured to clock automatically).

Calendar

Filter calendar on a multitude of parameters, eg. task event types, project event types, customers, projects, timeoff and more.

Events can be manually added or added through other sub-systems eg. task events or timeoff requests. Events can be attached with resources like documents or urls, have a granulated access structure and can be dragged & dropped around.

Search

Filter through Tasks, Projects, Customers, Resources, Users & Events. And since documentation is modelled in the same system as the project management, your searched will bring up both in the same structure.

Eg. if you search for server the search may result in records for projects or tasks involved in installing a customer server as well as all your documentation related to servers including documents & urls.