This post is kind of an extension of this post but rather different so I decided to start a new thread:
http://forums.opengoo.org/index.php?topic=781.new;topicseen#newI work with columbusgeek and I am with him saying we have searched and tried nearly every Project management app out there and they all seem to lack key features, or if they have the features, they loose the plot when it comes to useability.
OpenGoo is as close as it gets to being the best app available, I do feel however that it does also need to address the change in the industry from traditional project management apps to address a social aspect to it. Activity feeds (thanks to the likes of facebook) are fast becoming the next best thing in project management, the ability to look at a timeline of activity (more importantly being able to drill down into a users activity) and then comment on that activity is a particularly new trend I have found in all of the bigger "WebOffice/Portal"
I feel your dashboard, especialy the list view is a very similar concept to what I am describing above, all be it a very minimal version. One thing I noticed that was missing was if a task is completed it does not show up in the dashboard view. This is as columbusgeek suggested in his last post and re confirms what I have been thinking about for a few days now.... which is what started my long post
The basic idea behind the activity feed is that it provides a quick view of what has happened in a timeline but the details are important, so instead of milestone it would be "milestone completed" or "milestone created" along with who created it and and when. One key feature is that the stream is then used to drive easy collabortion in the team by allowing comments on each activity and the comment itself is then added to the top of the stream. As with your current dashboard list view, its based on time, so everything is in order so its hard to miss anything new that has happened in your spaces.
A good example of this is that I received an email from Matt (columbusgeek) this morning with a comment attached to a milestone but when I opened it using the link it didnt go directly to the task, and I checked my dashboards but found nothing so went looking for the milestone where it was and then I saw the comment. This entire process would be avoided as all I would do when logging in is go to my feed and process it kinda like we do with email. One bonus of working like this is that it reduces the number of emails coming in that need to be dealt with as the system gets busy the system emails become a bit of a pain, the activity feed will reduce this by allowing users to turn off email updates and rather use the feed to process everything.
Here are some links to some apps that have started to implement activity feeds that mat be of assistance if you feel this suggestion to be interesting
1. cyn.in (we are still considering using this along side opengoo for our documentation etc but the overlap is so much its a little impractical however they have a wonderful adobe air app that pulls in the activity feed and allows one to react directly from there without opening the web app)
see link here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/adobe_air_powered_cynin_deskto.html2.
http://www.producteev.com/ a very new service with a large focus on activity and social media integration, I just fee the interface and way tasks are managed is not ideal for large multi tier projects.
3.
http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home4. Facebook of course... the new updates they made to the activity feed where people can now comment on each status update was very clever indeed and its no surprise many apps are adopting this.
There are others I can dig out if needed but those are the main ones I can think of but if this idea is interesting I would be happy to provide more feedback if needed.
In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoy using opengoo and feel it has a very bright future. I dont usually take time to provide feedback unless I have allot of faith in a product and see the potential. We are a professional CMS theming company and are also considering doing a few themes for opengoo and making them available on our website with a "we recommend opengoo" plastered all over
Thanks again to all of you for the hard work to produce such a great app for us to use!!