Jumptree Project Management v1 .1 Preview Based on ASP.NET 2.0

First of all, thanks to all Jumptree v1.0 customers for making this possible, you guys gave us strength and confirmation of what we do; to a small startup company, it’s truly invaluable.

In this release, we fixed bugs that you’ve reported, we incorporated the suggestions you have made and most importantly, we’ve added several significant new features that will benefit your organizations.

Quick List

• Sql Server 2005 Support
• Calendar Collaboration and Localized Date Time Format
• Centralized Files Management
• Publishing Tasks / Clients Collaboration
• Get Organized with Batch Update
• Mass Emailing For Project Manager and Administrator
• Proxy Url Support
• One Page Project View.
• Reduced Page rendering size by 30%-90% reported via YSlow
• Usability Improvements
  • Continuous add for everything - “Add Another”
  • Print Friendly
  • Calendar selection for due dates
  • Minified CSS style sheets and Javascript for quicker download
• Others
  • Reduced unnecessary database calls by 20%

1. SQL Server 2005 Support

Even though from the feedbacks of some customers that they had v1.0 worked on SQL server 2005 but because we never tested against it, therefore, we couldn’t officially support it. Now, after comprehensive testing against every single store procedures, it is for a fact that Jumptree Project Management will work on SQL server 2005 with little effort on your part.

2. Calendar Collaboration and Localized Date Time Formats for ALL languages

This is a feature a lot of customers requested and such we decided to make it in this release. But that’s not it. We did more than you asked for!

With the excellent support of .NET framework, we made the calendar localized to your own language and date time formatted in the way that you are accustomed to as oppose to the hard set U.S time format mm/dd/yyyy in v.1.0 release. Name your language (English U.K, German, French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, etc, etc as long as it's supported by windows platform), we will detect your language automatically and format the calendar accordingly. It requires no effort on your part.

Even though the application is not yet ready for complete globalization, meaning support all static text in your language, but we hope by having a localized calendar, it will be a step forward in the right direction.

Two sample screen shots of the Calendar in English (U.S) and Chinese (Taiwan)

English (U.S)
 


Chinese (Taiwan)



The collaboration comes from the integration with “Projects”, “Milestones” and “Tasks” within the application. Your team will be able to easily identify what’s due and when is due, publish what the clients will see and collaborate the project in symphony.  

Project Status viewed by team member




Again, the exact same page seen in Chinese (Taiwan)

4


Project Status viewed by client (Notice, only published items above shows up)

 

Auto date/time format in different locals

English U.S



English U.K



Chinese Taiwan




German Germany



If you are trying to enter in a due date in U.S format for example when your language is English U.K, the system will smartly prompt you with the following message




Obviously, the above are just some sample languages that I chose for this blog post. Most likely, your language is supported.  Also, we've added the calendar icon date/time selection for your convienance as well, the reason it's delayed till now is because we want that to be localized to your language as well which it does now.

3. Centralized Files Management

Here is another item requested via quite a few customers. Most organizations revolves around files. Even though in v1.0, you could attach files through tasks and discussions, however, a centralized files repository is desired. We heard you and here it is with publish options to share with clients.

 




4. Publishing Tasks / Clients Collaboration

This is really a last minute request via one of our client and we were able to squeeze it into v1.1 release and oh boy, aren't we glad that we did. 

It's common to interact with clients and have clients view what your team is currently doing. This not only updates the client with real time progress of your project but also from a client's perspective, it gives them confidence to know what their money has been spent on.

Here is how to create a new task with publish option

 

After it's created, here is how it looks


 


Obviously, only published tasks will be visible to clients, you wouldn't want to expose critical or trivial tasks to clients.

Here is a glimpse of what it looks like to your team



The same list of tasks viewed by client (notice task id 43 and 45 are the published ones)



It's important to note though, your clients can't create nor edit tasks. The reason being is that first, everything that you do, should let the project manager knows first because he/she has to allocate time and budget for it. In addition, it should be your project manager who decides what your team is suppose to do, not the client, therefore, we decided to make the tasks view only to clients.

One additional feature is that if you decides to create a published task to a milestone, but the milestone itself is not published, it wouldn't make sense for you to publish the task when your project manager doesn't want the milestone to be seen by the clients. Therefore,

Deny Task Publishing Under Unpublished Milestone



5. Get Organized with Batch Update

One of the complains we've received in v1.0 is that you couldn't batch update tasks and discussions. No worry, we heard you loud and clear. In v1.1, we've added batch update to tasks, discussion and the new files management. You can almost update any attributes of that particular section as long as you have the proper permission.

A Sample of Task Batch Update

6. Mass Emailing For Project Manager and Administrator 

So you are the project manager and you want to quickly email your whole team without starting up a discussion because it won't be appropriate nor do you want to assign tasks to everyone because it's not a task?

This is the type of requests we've received and sure thing. Again, we heard you and we agree. Now, with the mass email capability, you can email your entire team and clients without digging through you email list.


The same type of functionality exist for administrators if you have to let every system users know that for instance, you will be doing server upgrades at midnight.


The Rests (No screen shots due to cosmetic styling still in progress)

URL Proxy Support

Some customers is behind firewall and therefore, the email being send out is the IP address from inside which is not accessible from outside. This issue is addressed in this released and with a simple configuration in the admin section, all your email will have the external IP address on it.


One Page Project View

In v1.0 project detail,  we had milestones with tasks attached to them. However, one thing was missing. What about tasks with NO milestone? Where did they go?

That was our mistake. It is fixed in V1.1. Now in one page, you can quickly get a glimpse of everything in your project.


Reduced Page rendering size by 30%-90% reported via YSlow

Yes, we've also noticed in v1.0, some of the pages depending on how many tasks/discussions you had, sometimes the page size could grow to a huge 800kb. NOT GOOD!

We're glad that we've addressed that as well. Using the Yahoo developed YSlow analyzer and following the rules for high performance web sites (although, we still need to work on a few items), currently a 800kb page under our new infrastructure, it's reduced to merely 81kb, almost a 90% reduction! This I'm sure, will make everyone VERY happy.

On a similar note,  all the Javascripts and CSS are now minified. An old 35kb of Javascript, after compression is reduce to 25kb. Even though it's little, but in this release, we try to take away whatever we can to improve your experience.


That's it for the v1.1 preview. It will be released in two weeks or so. So please come back and check on us.

Hope we will be able to bring you a whole new experience and as always, if you have any questions at all, please come by our Jumptree forum and question away.