Forum OpenACS Development: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting

1: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting

Posted by Peter Marklund on 03/27/03 05:36 PM

I wanted to announce that Collaboraid has started developing an OpenACS Logger application that is being funded by the Heidelberg University. The application aims to cover time and expenses reporting but should also be useful for logging other things. A draft specification is available here.

We would welcome any use cases that people anticipate for this application so that we can build support for those into the design at an early stage. Currently I am working on the data model and I will post it for community review here as soon as a first version is ready.

2: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 03/27/03 09:02 PM

Peter, this is super awesome. Thanks to you and Heidelburg!

talli

7: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 2)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 03/28/03 03:17 PM

Talli,
although we do have a really cool Burg (castle) here, it's HeidelbErg (not bUrg).

3: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 03/28/03 05:39 AM

Hi Peter,

some ideas around your specs:

Instead of associating a log entry with a project, why don't you associate it with an object (e.g. how long did it take to write this file), hoping for projects to be objects.

Furthermore I was wondering whether you are going to use the categorization system you released or if you are amending something else. We do have a variant of a categorization system working in our port for AIESEC and are adding the categorization widget to the various applications that need it. Timo actually wanted to talk about this during the OpenACS social, but apparently he has forgotten to mention this so far (gonna remind him).

4: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 3)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 03/28/03 07:45 AM

How would you add time logging to bugs in the bug-tracker. Not that I'd expect you to add this facility, but could you keep this in mind when you are designing the whole application, so it can be added like a service contract or by any other means later to the bugtracker.

5: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Marklund on 03/28/03 09:47 AM

Malte,
thanks for the feedback!

The reason we are mapping log entries to projects is that I envision that is what you need when you do time and expenses reporting in a company - you log your hours within a project.

Of course in addition to the project association a log entry could also be related to some other object such as a bug in the but tracker. I think the Bug Tracker use case is good. I imagine the Bug Tracker would simply use the Logger Tcl API to create a time entry when a bug is created.

As far as categories are concerned we were planning to use CR keywords just like the Bug Tracker does. However, if Timo can do some kind of beta release of his new categories package now (add it in cvs under contrib) we would reconsider. This is not a big project and we hope to finish it soon.

I think the benefit of using a categories package over CR keywords would only really be significant if we expect log entries to share categories with other packages. I guess one could imagine such things as Location, Office, department etc. to be shared with other dotwrk applications. I do think it would be better to map cateogories/keywords to acs objects rather than cr items. Also AFAIK there is no site-wide UI for managing cr keywords, something I assume the categories package will provide.

6: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 03/28/03 03:10 PM

To start with we need this application to track hours spent by our E-Learning support staff at the medical school (mostly students working from home) and Collaboraid needs this to track hours spent on support/development (with a client view). This is clearly more a .WRK type thing, but I hope that we can make this general enough so that it can be used for .LRN as well.

Some things that come to mind:
1. Project for a class -> who worked on what for how long.
2. Research groups -> documenting time investment in projects and subprojects.

Integrating with Bug/Ticket Tracker and Calendar would also be nice. :-)

Any other ideas?

8: Re: New Application: Time and Expenses Reporting (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 03/29/03 12:46 AM

Peter, this is great!

Our company uses the old ACS 3.4 Intranet application, and one of the aspects we use the most is time reporting for billing and internal tracking purposes.

Here's the feedback I've received on that system:

- It's helpful to have a good UI for entering work done over more than one day at a time.

- whenever people do work on the Intranet, (for example on our ticket-tracker), they want to be able to enter the time at the same time. So if they close a ticket, they want to enter the work they did and the amount of time it took right at that moment, instead of doing it separately.

- we do go over large amounts of data at once. The managers like to look at aggregates of what's been done on what project, and who's been doing what. We also do huge reports of everybody's logged hours on particular projects, and use them for billing purposes. I'm not sure if this will work okay with the CR or not.

- keep in mind some of this data may be mapped to calendars as well. Not sure if this makes any difference, and you've probably already thought of this.

- It's nice to relate comments with the work done. Also sometimes more than one person at a time is working on the same project, so should they log it separately? Probably so..

Just some random thoughts and feedback. Hope that helps.