Hi all, if there’s a better place to discuss this, please let me know.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that the Project Module has lots of promise, but was neglected by Sugar. Many of us are enhancing the Project module for our own needs.
If you have specific changes you are making to SuiteCRM to the Project Module, or you have very specific requirements that you would you like to see, could you post them in this thread?
Here are some coding changes I’m making (all code will be offered to the SalesAgility team for possible inclusion into the base SuiteCRM package.
Treat Project & Project Task as full grown-up modules (Make sure they are available as Dashlets, searchable in standard search, AOD, closable in a dashlet or list like a standard task, etc)
Insert Standard Project Task Template - Under a project where you create a task, allow an option to insert a series of tasks from a template. Most templates would have 5-20 items and we just need 4 or 5 templates. The expected end dates of the tasks will automatically update when they’re copied into the project tasks.
Convert an Opportunity into a Project. Very similar functionality to converting a Lead into an Contact.
Light “Project Costing” module - where a project will have 5-20 separate cost records, each with a budget & actual column. Very similar to project-tasks.
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What other changes are people making to the project module? What other improvements would help your company?
This sounds great. The ability to use simple templates is the main feature we need - i.e. add from template (pre-loaded with durations and assignees).
Ideally this would be with successor and predecessor relationships that can change the finish date - I think that resource levelling would be overkill.
For the top-level, an indication of progress of the entire project, with an end date set and end date calculated on tasks. Also, it would be great to have a summary showing completion and any outstanding items.
Where are you in your work? as we’d be willing to put some engineering effort in to make this a reality.
In regard to the Project Templates, might it be possible to configure the Workflow functions in SuiteCRM to create templates of ProjectTasks ?
I have played around with the very briefly and it looked as though it would work.
The nice thing about this is that you get to configure for your own environment.
This was originally written by Mr Milk, and its under an RPL ( Reciprocal Public License ), but this would be pretty straight forward to build into the Projects Module.
Nice to have extensions to it could be:
Visualisation of Milestones
A description detail mouse over icon (i)
Happy to work with you guys, on pulling these ideas together
A function I am missing is the ability to duplicate a project including the tasks.
We have a number of project types and will find it incredibly useful to be able to replicate a draft project (including the tasks) for every new project of the same type.
One thing you could try is using the Workflow in SuiteCRM to create a number of related Project Tasks, when a Project is created. I did some very limited testing with this, and was able to set up a Project Template that would create 4 default Project Tasks.
Perhaps with a little more work this would solve your use case.
Could you provide me with more detailed information on how you achieved the necessary replication of the tasks?
I tried an example and some tasks would be created, but not with the details from the original tasks on the project. Obviously I am doing something wrong but it is not clear to me as to how you create the new tasks using the original tasks as a template.
I have attached a screenshot of a project workflow. What I am doing here is this :-
When a NEW record is created that has the name of “Template” I want workflow to trigger and create a Project Task with the name “Initial Scope” and to Set the description field to “see the text in the image”, and to set a Finish date 20 days ahead of the record creation time.
You can add multiple actions to create many project tasks, and set fields accordingly, including replacing the Project name of Template with something else.