I've been thinking about project management requirements and the use of an e-mail client for project management needs. I've seen the very good integration work that Microsoft has done with MS Project, Outlook and Sharepoint... but I think that's it's overkill and a change in paradigm is, in fact, needed.
The simplest form of project management is actually just time and task management and assignment. Outlook, GroupWise, Evolution all provide task management and appointment management. I'm now thinking that a small extension could be made to task management to make it show up in the calendar (along with appointments) like a Gantt chart. Essentially what would need to happen is that start and end dates would need to be set per task. Perhaps we should eliminate the 'tasks' idea as it now is, and create a specialised appointment that is marked as a 'project' appointment. This can then be busy searched against to check when the next available timeframe is for a project using a particular resource. The nice thing about using the e-mail client is that: 1) normal e-mail can be used as a transport of all project changes 2) normal calendar benefits can be applied to projects (busy search, etc) 3) the e-mail client is a de facto habitat 4) already integrated document management systems can be used for project documentation without extra effort 5) project members can be any number of contacts in existing address books 6) e-mail messages can be linked to projects 7) potentially instant messages could also be linked to projects (dependant on e-mail client integration with IM product) A simple starting point for very basic personal project management would simply be to allow tasks to be dependant on each other. The next point would be for tasks to be allocated to 'project appointments' - the tasks would then act as milestones, and as they're checked off they can provide a good indication of whether the estimated timeframe for the set of tasks will be enough. Also, if the e-mail client knows the work day settings (working and non-working hours) then it can automatically schedule more appointments if tasks aren't completed. It's a starting idea, and I think it's relevant and useful. _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
