For me personally, I’d adapt the important features for these simple repeated projects are:
Easy to use project templates. Preferably with the ability to pre-load durations and assignees - and to be able to have a “copy from template at this start date”
Task tracking/progress (I think this is covered in SuiteCRM already).
Task successor/predecessor relations - no desire yet for resource levelling (on assignee as resource) but if a duration is extended then the flow on effect should affect later tasks (or flag them as overlapping).
Gantt chart
Top level overview - project completed/closed, or underway and any outstanding items (particularly any items outstanding on customer input). The date the project will finish (calculated from the tasks). These are the details I’d want to see in a report/dashlet.
Is there currently a way to obtain Gantt functionality in SuiteCRM 7.1.x ? We have a customer who desperately needs it. Perhaps you could sell a module? Or via consulting time? Or release a beta module…
My upgraded projects module will be ready in the next few weeks, so if they can wait you’ll get a pretty decent gantt chart with milestones, Finish to start and Start to Start relationships between tasks, project templates and a projects overview resource calendar. It will be part of a forthcoming version of suiteCRM and also sold as a seperate module for Sugar CE users.
If you cant wait till then you could try this module in the mean time. Its basic but might ok for your client.
if you’re to the point of alpha or beta testing, there are lots of us SuiteCRM users on the board who would be happy to help test. A way for the non-developers to give back to the community.
I orignially looked at the that jquery gantt plugin but did’nt want to use it because I dont like the look and feel of it and I wanted to produce
something that was more like what sugar pro has and make it better.
Hi Andy, From my perspective, just a standard .csv is fine. It would be ideal if we could export a project, have someone edit in Excel, OpenOffice, or the software of their choice, then import/merge/replace their changes into SuiteCRM.
Most PM software will support a MIcrosoft Project .csv format. If the export format is similar to Microsoft’s, it should handle most compatibility needs.
Yes, there are a few project management apps that import/export in Microsoft Project XML format. It seems to be the standard format. One example of a project management/billing/collaboration app that provides this feature is activeCollab which is a php application, and you can look at the MS Project import/export code! It’s called the Microsoft Project Manager module. They sell it for $49 for self-hosted (or free on their cloud hosted service but you can’t look at the code when it’s running on their cloud platform). Here’s more details: https://www.activecollab.com/help/books/ms-project-manager/about.html
Andy, you can also look at the free open source java app ProjectLibre - the free replacement app for MS Project. It’s got java code to save and load Microsoft Project XML files. Pretty simple to transpose it to over to PHP.
Consider this. As soon as your improved Projects module’s ready, I imagine, if you, or Sales Agility, would want to sell your Projects module, for $49 (or whatever pricing you feel is best) on SugarOutfitters, you’d probably get a lot of takers ! Especially with import/export to Microsoft Project XML format, Gantt charts, Kanban charts, Notifications to participants and watchers/followers, etc. Better project functionality than Sugar Pro.
