Beta Invitation For Jumptree Project

It's finally here. After nearly half year of planning, the first public beta release of Jumptree Project Management software based on ASP.NET 2.0 is available for download. 

In the past few years, my consulting firm has experimented with all types of bug tracking and project management software ranging from Mantis, Bugzilla, Fogbugz to Basecamp and MS project. Some are too simple, some are too complicated. After juggling around with multiple software one after another, we finally decided that it was not a solution to effectively manage our projects and our clients, such the study and research around what we really need got started.

We're excited to share our software with you and hope you'll find it as useful as we have. In fact, we ate our own dog food by using Jumptree Project to manage its own development--and it was delicious.





Here is a few of our quick highlights.

• Birds Eye Dashboard - With 11 modules available in one view, you quickly get a report of your late tasks, todays tasks, new tasks, tomorrows tasks, need your approvals tasks, project statistics and four others.
  
  
• Milestone Workflow - View related milestones in a chronological graphic flow chart with the abilities to keep track tasks as well as shift related milestones in any given projects. In addition, you can publish the milestones to enable clients to keep up to date with your development status.
  
  
• Discussion Tracker - Never have to remember what the discussion was all about anymore. With the abilities to attach tasks, milestones and files, you can quickly trace to as well as trace back what needed to be done and why they had to be done.
  
  
• Client Portal - - Enable your clients to log in, view your published milestones and engage in discussions with your team throughout the project.
  
  
• Smart / Powerful Filters - Filters remember all your selections even if you close your browser (thanks to ASP.NET profile service). In addition, with the huge lists of pre-defined powerful filters, it gives you the ability to query all kinds of reports that you might want to see.
  
  
• Email Notifications - Receive notifications of all new/update/replied tasks, discussions and membership sign ups. Never worry about missing a thing anymore.
  
  
• Free 45 days Trial - At last, you get 10 users, 100 tasks from the free trial. More importantly, even after the 45 days trial, you can still use it, its just that we will constantly pop up out of no where to remind you. We can be annoying, but we are not out there to get you either. As long as it helps your organize your projects.
  

Here are some of my personal favorite features.

Organize Tasks into Milestones (or phases as some people called it)

First, our projects are typically divided into several phases/milestones and to effectively track what everyone need to do? We needed to group tasks into several groups (collect requirements, wire frame UI interface, develop prototype, testing, etc) and track all tasks with their status at any point during development. The following screen shot illustrates my point.





Seeing a list of milestones within a project is nice, but it will be better if we can visualize their relationships in chronological order and at the same time, still be able to view and track the tasks within them. *Note, the milestone with blue background indicates the current milestone. If you shift any milestone to any other dates? All subsequent milestones will be shifted as well if you choose to.


In addition, we need accountability. It's essential that we be alerted of the milestones that are late and the milestones that are coming up soon. [We display four types of milestones: Late, Today and Tomorrow, Current, Closed].



Noticed the Published column? Well, when you deal with clients, some of them might like to keep track of your development status. By publish the milestone; your client will be able to keep track of its status, however rest assured, your internal tasks are not exposed to them at all.

Remember and Track Your Discussions.

Its typical throughout a project, we often engage in discussions both internally among team members as well as with clients back and forth. I can't recall how many times brain storm ideas, compromises and tasks are resulted from these heated discussions, only later, we cant recall which discussion started all of it. No worries, first you can categorize your discussions for better organization. See below




Secondly, you can attach tasks, milestones (new or existing ones) and files to a particular post in your discussion. This way, you clearly sees at the end of discussion, what tasks need to be done, which milestones this discussions are related to and the files related to the discussion.





Mirrored view from Tasks (You can keep track of the tasks and find out which discussion and where in the discussions the task originated from.)





I won't go into all the screen-shots, please download it and try it out for yourself. Remember it's still in Beta, so if you noticed any bugs, please let us know through our public forum. Or you can simply post your opinions back here.

We are open to suggestions. If you have anything you dont like or if you have things you would like to have, we are a bunch of very open minded folks here. If enough people request certain features, we will listen to your voices!

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS