Sperling - Information Technology

When paper and pencil are not enough ...

We all have a way to complete work tasks laying ahead of us. We also know, there may not always be an easy way to solve them. And this gets even more difficult when it comes to tasks within a team, where one colleague assigns a task to another or even to more at once. Fortunately, various useful software applications help in similar situations. Redmine is one of those and with a high ability to execute.

Redmine is a great open-source software for project and task management in a variety of areas. It reaches from the helpdesk to coordinating activities in legal departments or shared services or purchasing. Redmine also records the level of accomplishment of the goals through several projects and sub-projects at once. It tracks tasks development and all reactions of participants and followers as they come.

Issues overview and features

Both ongoing and closed tasks can be viewed through a wide range of views. There is a general overview, project activity overview, project plan and deliveries view, and of course the most commonly used project's to-do list. It allows to filter displayed information freely by task status, owner or solver, date of creation or deadline, degree of task completion and many other task attributes including custom ones. At the same time, each user can set up, what should be displayed in views and in what order (columns, groupings, totals etc.). And of course, any such view definition can be saved under a certain name and provided to other users. In addition, the progress of the work can also be monitored from a time perspective by looking at the project calendar or Gantt Chart.

Additionally, the page view can be customized, so that its content and appearance dynamically render information directly from system records. And any user can customize their personal home page by simply dragging and dropping available building blocks to required locations. Most of the data in the view pages can also be exported to PDF or table form in CSV.

Tasks and their history track

In Redmine, it is possible to specify the number of complex attributes for each task or use just predefined ones. In addition to task description and individual comments created during task completion by each resolver, partial changes (differences) made in texts are displayed in colour along with the creation date and time. This provides a complete and detailed history of the task's solution progress.

For advanced project management, reporting of hours spent to solve tasks is also available, as well as processing status, deadlines, cross-links between tasks and many very practical information. Each task can have subtasks as well as different types of links and dependencies between multiple tasks.

Tasks can be edited, copied, or deleted depending on role-based permissions. Selected tasks or comments can be marked as private. Followers to each task can be added and removed. By this, other people than the assigned solver can participate in the task resolution.

The system sends email notifications to affected users (changes in tasks statuses, comments added) based on their preferences made in the user profile settings.

Advanced options and parametrization

In addition to the task management module, news, project wiki pages and discussion forums modules are available. Redmine includes also shared documents and files management.

Redmine also provides complex user and group management with advanced access rights mechanisms based on roles. These are supported by different authentication modes with multiple custom configurations. For example, multiple LDAP compatible authentication configurations may be configured in combination with local authentication. It also benefits from anonymous access or automated user registration.

Although Redmine provides very broad and exhaustive options for configuration and parametrization, all its features can be used just right after installation. Redmine allows virtually any task status and workflow configuration, user-defined task fields, custom activity and priority lists, custom defined roles, and their rights, even depending on the statuses and fields of the task entry form. Inheritance of project definitions for sub-projects also belongs among other very interesting and special features.

The visual appearance of the user interface can be customized using range of freely available themes. Redmine also supports multilingual environment, where the text strings visible in the user interface can be easily changed at any time according to customer preferences.

For more information visit redmine.org