Tips & Tricks Archives - Page 2 of 2

An Underestimated Collaboration Tool in AceProject – The Discussion Forum

Nowadays, we hear more about wikis, blogs and tweets than forums. Actually, forums are not as "Web 2.0" as these collaboration tools. Nevertheless, discussion forums are incredibly useful in a project management application, from a collaboration standpoint.

Everybody's talking about Twitter and how cool it is to post 140-character messages. I definitely agree with that. However, let's not forget that a forum enables you to post both short and long messages. With Twitter, if you have a lot to say, you'll have to post several short messages, which is not always convenient and interesting to read. A forum still remains the best of both worlds.

In AceProject, there's a comment thread at the task level and a discussion forum at the project level. Both empower involved users to share ideas, knowledge, tips or any other useful information. The discussion forum is more powerful however. In addition to general discussion, it permits creating topics. Messages are then posted in a specific topic and replies to these messages can be posted thereafter. Hence, collaboration capabilities using this feature abound. […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-10-28T13:36:00-04:002009-10-28|

Using AceProject for document check in/check out

Document management is a very convenient feature in
AceProject. Documents can be associated with a task or a project. AceProject’s document management features include: Versioning, Locking and Public/Private Availability. Locking a document doesn’t hide it. Actually, anyone who can view the document can see it even when it’s locked. It’s simply put in read-only mode.

One might be interested in document management for storage, archiving and collaboration, among other things. Today, I’d like to focus on version control (a.k.a. check in/check out) which can be achieved using the locking feature in AceProject.

Locking a document protects it against deletion and overwriting. Several scenarios can require locking documents. Here are a two examples:

Set in stone documents and document templates

Documents that should not be altered by anyone should be locked. For instance, final/approved versions, legal documents, quotes, invoices, documents from clients, etc. All templates that users start from should be locked as well. It may be forms, invoices, quotes, web pages or any other relevant source that is used over and over again in your organization.

Prevent conflicts when several users […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-10-13T16:25:00-04:002009-10-13|

A fun trick: DON’T build your projects reports in AceProject

All the boss wants is to know how the project is going. She’s not interested in the task specifics. She wants to know if the project is on track or not.

Of course, who manages just one project these days? You need to be able to show all your projects together.

2 little reports will do the trick for you: the Project Gantt Chart and a customized Projects list.

Start with the Projects list.

Go to My Office > My Projects > My Assigned Projects.

This page shows all the projects you’re assigned to. You can customize the look of this list to show computed fields like Actual Hours and Estimated Hours.

I suggest you choose these fields:

This will give you a nice report that you can simply print or export to Excel:

A Projects report like this takes 5 seconds to make – you won’t need to reset the columns once you’ve done it. It’s dynamic, so the data is always up-to-date. It […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-10-23T21:37:00-04:002008-10-23|

Task dependencies

Most projects require that some tasks are accomplished in a specific order. For example, in a publicity project, the marcomm firm will want the client to approve the design before it goes to press. When the client, the representative and the printer are not in the same city, the risk of the file going to print too early can get pretty high. Ask any printing company how pleasant that is.

If you want to make sure that your client approves the design before it is sent to print, set up your client project in AceProject, and link the client approval task to the printing task with a dependency:

Once there is a dependency, you won't be able to open a task, unless the previous task is completed:

And in the Gantt chart, it's easy to see how the tasks are linked:

However, what I like most about task dependencies is how task dates are […]

By Daniel Raymond|2008-07-11T12:00:00-04:002008-07-11|