Re: [Planner Dev] Resource feedback

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 05:06 +0200, Lincoln Phipps wrote:
> 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.

Cool idea.

> 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.

This could get a little complicated - especially if more than one
resource is assigned to a task.  One may consider a task complete,
another may consider it 90% done...So minimally the PM would need the
option to commit the update or reject it.  I suppose this doesn't just
apply to a jabber interface, though - huh.

Also it'd be important to know if the jabber server removes old messages
at some point - updates or messages could be lost if the user is away
for an extended period - say a 2 week vacation.

Come to think of it, we should add a vacation manager to planner.  Then
you could stop the messages from being generated.

> 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.

As long as they request it - I wouldn't want the feature to turn into
nagware or push out so much info that nobody logs onto jabber anymore.

I was also thinking of a panel applet that would keep their current
tasks for all their current projects, prioritized of course, so a
project resource could see their top priority tasks at a glance.

This is very close to the concept of using the to do list in an email
client, and I'd like to have that for Evolution, but not everyone uses
Evolution, and we might want to add features that are not available in
the Evolution to do list (unless we hack Evolution too).

I'm wondering now if we could make this panel applet jabber aware and
have it capture (and send) the Planner messages (task assigned, task
update request, and associated replies) so they don't even show up in a
message window.

> 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.

Since Project Management is mostly about communication, I'd really like
to see Planner integrated with different communications technologies
wherever it makes sense.

I think it would be cool to show when a resource is on line with an icon
of some sort, and have the ability to click on it to pop up a message
window (in their messaging client of course - no need to reinvent that).

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>