Project Management in Kentico CMS 5.5 R2

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 brings a brand new Document Management Package that includes:

-          Project Management

-          Document Libraries

-          WebDAV (more about WebDAV support here)

This package will be a part of the Ultimate edition as well.

In this article, I will make a quick tour through the Project Management.

Introduction

Project Management is a tool that helps us manage projects and tasks. Each project consists of task that can have a deadline or not. Tasks can be private or public. Project Management monitors progress of all tasks and the project itself.

Using new webparts and widgets, we can manage all projects and tasks directly from the live site.

As projects are very often a part of a group, this feature is also available through Workgroups (based on the Groups module). We can even invite a member who is not a group member as a member of the project, like an external vendor etc.

Project Management is not a document-based feature, so we don’t see projects and tasks in the content tree.

Live site project management

We will start with an overview of the live site project management.

To create a new project, just click the New project action on the live site.

Figure 1 - Empty project list

When a new project is being created, we can set several properties as shown in the following figure:

Figure 2 - New project

When the Allow task ordering option is enabled, we can change the order of tasks inside the project – more info later.

A successfully created project is shown in the list of projects.

Figure 3 - List of projects

Once the project has been created, we can manage the security of the project, just click the Edit project button.

Figure 4 – Project info page

Figure 5 - Project security management

To add a new task, we click the New task action on the Project info page (see Figure 4 – Project info page). A new task dialog contains settings that will affect the progress/status/priority of the task.

Figure 6 - Task properties

A private task is not visible to all other participants in the project.

As the project is running, we can see progress of particular tasks including the whole project’s progress.

Figure 7 - Project progress

Using the green arrows, we can change the order of the tasks. We can send a notification using the envelope icon as well.

Look at the progress

There are new webparts/widgets that will help our users see their assigned tasks and the projects they are members of.

Figure 8 - List of Tasks assigned to the user

Figure 9 - List of Tasks owned by the user

Figure 10 - List of projects the user is member of

Project management & configuration

As described earlier, we can manage all projects and task directly on the live site, but we can also manage them via CMSDesk. Project management is located in CMSDesk -> Tools -> Project management.

Figure 11 - Project management in CMSDesk

CMSDesk Project management offers the same functionality that was described for the live site earlier.

Figure 12 - Management of the selected project

As we can see, there are lists of projects and lists of tasks. We can also modify all project/task statuses on the Configuration tab.

Figure 13 - Project statuses configuration

Webparts/widgets

We have earlier seen some project management web parts and widgets. Below is a list of all web parts and widgets that we can use to monitor and manage our projects and tasks on the live site.

Figure 14 - Webparts

Figure 15 - Widgets

Conclusions

Please note: we are just finishing the development of the Project management module, so the final screens could be slightly different (not features).

Kentico CMS 55 R2 including the Document Management package will be released in December 2010!