Redmine for Coworking

transcript

Redmine for (Co)working (Spaces)

How Redmine, the agile Issue Tracker can be used for organization of, in and with a coworking

Why Issue Tracker?

Problems that makers and users of coworking wanna solve include:

The management tasks, that are important for the space to live, have to be clear and getting overview should be easy

People should have an easy way to find out, where they can help others and who can help them

Work with Clients and Partners should cost less time, overhead and pain.

Keyfeatures

Creating one or many projects Having different people in the team for every project Have different roles and permissions per projects Save various types of documents in a clear document

workflow Create new types of documents Create new workflows Keep everything in sight with calendars, charts, personal

widgets and queries etc. Upload and share files. Time – Planning, Time-Tracking and Controlling

What are 'Documents'?

Documents are like forms on paper: You have different types of fields and can write some data into them.

So a 'Task' can be a document, an 'idea' or an 'customer'.

Whatever object you have in your daily life and you want to track some of them, create a document – tracker with just the fields you need.

Documents can be related to each other

What are the advantages of documents and relations?

In contrary to many huge, clumsy and expensive project management suites, the documents and relations in redmine are really modular.

You can relate different types of documents with different types of relations.

So you can create very flexible structures, almost everything is possible and what ever you don't like: change it.

Ok, and what about projects now?

In a project, you order documents (let's say tasks) in a timeline.

You have different milestones, specifying what must be ready at what time

You have different priorities, telling you if things must, should or can be done

You can further set explicit 'blocking' relations to find the critical issues

Everything has a customizable status Also you have categories and can assign documents to

people

How are people involved?

In every project people can have different roles. These roles have different permissions, so that

you can have e.g. managers, coworkers, customers, guests...

Every Issue (Document) can be assigned to one nor no person

Additionally people can watch issues, so they receive updates in their activity feed

Connecting to the outside world

Redmine let's you receive emails on updates, based on user defined settings

Also it can be configured to receive emails by coworkers

So it acts like a 'better mailinglist'. Redmine offers Rss and Atom – Feeds And you can export documents to PDF and

Lists of documents to CSV (e,g, for Excel)

Integration with existing business software

Existing documents can practically be synchronized using the underlying 'source code management'

That is basically Version Control with cool technologies like Git and many more (Subversion etc.)

So all files on your servers and workstations can be synchronized in a peer to peer style and referenced to your tasks.

Plus there is integration for LDAP and OpenID what is useful for more advanced integration.

That's all? No:

Redmine also has Wikis (basically every long test acts like a wiki) Forums News Statistics and Calculation (e.g, 'will this work or

not...') A lot of open source plugins (though some are

weird and some are buggy and you might want to consult us instead of patchworking here).

Redmine in the daily life...

Redmine is great, for example when you Have to work with a customer on some media

production and want to involve some other freelancers Track information for really important tasks in the

future, that you should not forget Have some crazy idea and want to enable many

people to work with you Create documentation collaboratively Add some meta – information to all your files

… in the Coworking Space

Everybody could have an account Every small team can have an own project for themselves Every project somebody does with clients can also have an

own projects In shared projects there is clarity about responsibility, effort

and costs. Common projects like cleanup and making-things-nice can be

in a project, where everybody is Additionally to all the paper at the walls, you can have always

up to date information on a touchscreen or beamer (just an idea :).

Good ideas:

It's a good idea to deactivate (or ignore) all features, that you don't use.

It's a good idea to try all features until you really understand them

There are some very small links in the default theme, that can do a lot useful things

When you use Redmine in a team, it's a good idea to make sure, that everybody really understands, what 'Categories', 'Statuses' etc. are :)

It's a very good idea to think a minute about the actual workflows in your team and how they can be realized with redmine.

What does the future bring?

There will be some new project management tools based on Redmine

We are working on highly improved usability, so that all the complexity people might fear goes away.

Also the integration of existing software will receive a lot of improvement.

If you have any idea, don't hesitate to contact us We offer redmine customization, hosting and we

like to cooperate in some more advanced projects.

More...

redmine.test.0xb5.org redmine@devolute.org code.brueckenschlaeger.org/projects/redmine