Hi all, Thanks for the thoughts and assistance - much appreciated.
@Clifford: we aren't using MS Project and ~35 of our 60+ staff and students are Mac users - so it gets really cumbersome when you're tied to a PC-based solution. (We're coming from Filemaker + Excel. Filemaker was chosen b/c it was cross-platform, but then they tied it to Excel via ODBC on PC, which they could never successfully replicate on Mac.) @Nicholas: you're right, there's still some behaviours that are ambiguous so I need to story it all up. Also, this is meant to be a replacement component for an in-house project management system that's been live for over a year now, so we have production, staging & CI servers already setup. Design expert? Ha! The push is for functionality right now. :-) @Ben: that's interesting - I haven't studied SE or even CS (I have a nano degree!) so I'm kind of winging it. Early on in the user-consultation phase I asked people to try and forget about everything and tell me how they plan, etc. But we've got an established history and systems that people are familiar with - from here and other places. When it comes down to it, we have to allocate people to tasks and time to people - while dodging leave, their work on other projects, varying availabilities, etc. - over a large time span (making calendar formats a little too unwieldy), there's only so many ways to do that, right? In the end it became easier to ask them what they'd change about the current system. @Jason: being the in-house sysadmin, I get feedback from my colleagues every day - if it's not up to snuff, they will let me know (loudly and frequently). @Daniel: I'm after a guru coder to work closely with so that I can learn from them. As I'm a permanent employee of the institute, training me up adds value. And there's no way a training manual would cut it - it's not that the current system is complicated, it's that it lacks functionality. We have some staff going to back to Excel to plan and having a casual copy the numbers into the web interface. :-( Thanks again all! -- Tim McEwan <snip> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
