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Hi guys, first of all thank u for your effort on improving this project and providing support to newcomers. I apologize for this long post 
As I've said I'm new here working for a SM company and trying to find appropriate solution for our company's needs in project management.
I have searched all over internet trying to find a solution that would fit. First my focus was on free solution, now I'm thinking maybe is better for us to find propriety software that is throughout standard features adoptable to our needs. Unfortunately I do not have any experience with php and/or sql, therefore I'm dependent on user ready adaptability. Nevertheless , I have tried out a dozen of PM tools, and somehow keep coming back to dotproject and respectfully to W2P (since I was aware of its existence just recently). It seems to me that this could be it.
Since this is a sole initiative, I would like to present this as good solution to my management but would need some help on features to understand what are my options and most likely to answer to tens of questions. I will tried to put my issues in couple of points (well maybe more )
1. I need simplicity! This is mandatory since my job will be to train and motivate for about 15 employees to use this tool. What are my options to disable or hide some of the features? I do not want to confuse them with options that they just do not need. For example, we have several project types and sub types and this is really important for filtering, I realized that I could manage this throughout Department feature, creating departments and sub-departments responsible for certain projects, automatically making them kind of project types. Department editor has Department type feature Profit/Cost - I don't need that, our project managers and participants have very less or nothing to worry about money issues. Same thing goes about "budget" fields, these should be only visible to financial managers. Can I disable this Department type field, hide default fields or add permission for fields to be visible for some users and other not?
2. Tasks issue. I do not o particularly understand the difference between dynamic and regular task. And how does task completion is relevant to the actual project end date. As I can see if there is only one task assigned to the project actual end date of the project is when this task is competed. Well this is not correct in our case, since our projects are dependent on some events which are out of our ability to influence when certain event will occur (for example Evaluation Comity gathering - we know it will happen but we do not have a clue when, no dates to assign to this task which involves preparation of staff, presentation etc.) and this event is crucial in following tasks assignments but not known to us until the week before when actual event will occur. Therefore connection between the last task finish date and actual project end date gives wrong data in project overview. Can you help me how to bypass this issue and add consequent tasks as they occur without having the wrong actual project end date shown?
3. We would like to implement unique project number which is visible in our project list. We have certain format of this number related to the start year of the project, project type (department), and incremental number. Not that I am keen to have this done automatically but we do need the field shown in the list so the last project number is visible to know which is next when adding a new project? How can I add new column in project list view connected to custom field "Project No."? Additionally, Can I change the name of the default fields provided?
4. I can not find in your user guide how to use System Lookup Values, as I can tell it is not enough to just change the names or add an item into a drop down lists which we would need to adapt company types, project statuses, task types etc.
5. Is there any way that I can change the background color of the user interface and the color of buttons and column name bars just to make it more compliant with our company visual identity?
6. I noticed that projects have option "Notify by Email", but you can notify only the project owner or all project contacts. In our contacts list for each project we will have client contacts but we do not want to inform them on our internal project progress issues. But we would like to be able to notify by email the person of our choice inside or outside the company, to pick from the list, most probably someone from management of our own company or administrative personnel.
7. Since this tool will eventually, when used, have substantial data on our project lists, completion dates and other details, how come there is no simple feature to export the filtered data into xls file format or text format?
This is all for now, I hope someone will have the patience to help me out, I would really appreciate your input and opinion if this software is suitable for our needs given the data I've provided, or should I just move on and find something more simple in sense of possibility of customization throughout user interface due to my lack of knowledge in php programing and database development.
English is not my native language, please do not shoot if I have made some mistakes  Thanks a lot! |
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