Essentially what you described is exactly where we are focusing the product: Small teams working with many customers and their related “service oriented” projects.  We are not yet “feature complete” but we’re getting there quickly.

In the next day or two we will adding an RSS option to the Project Blog pages.  RSS may help your team coordinate their activities and maintain momentum as focus changes from task-to-task.  As updates are made across the various projects (tasks completed, comments posted, etc) each person will be automatically notified.

We will be implementing a few new features in the short term that are related to your questions:

1) Activity templates (attach a set of pre-configured items to a Project Blog)
2) Project specific views for projects in the Activity window (like a Gantt report)
3) Task dependencies

If you scan the forums you’ll find that we’re pretty up-front about what we plan to do and not do.  This area is particularly important to us.

We are also seriously reviewing an opportunity to embed an existing process workflow engine (BPM) to help drive some automation throughout the system.  We are looking for common use-case examples and would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Hi there - thanks for the answer.  Your short-term new features (activity templates, project views, dependencies) should meet our needs, or at the minimum will be worth our while to give Solve360 a shot.  Is there an internal email list you can add me to, for when that feature set launches?

BPM is interesting - its something that we do at a primitive, intuitive level, but we want to get increasingly formalized in our approach as we grow.

For use-case, here’s an example -

client inquires about a web design/marketing package via a form.
we automatically create a client id and populate our db, and send out an email.
meanwhile a client services rep gives them a call.
we walk them through a discovery process, again into the db.
we aggregate that info, which informs info architecture and design.
we show the client something, loop through that once or twice.
launch the site, follow up with marketing.

so, we end up back and forth between project manager, tech, design and some 3rd party contracting.

Engineering SpecialOps - Feb 03, 2009 11:05am

Essentially what you described is exactly where we are focusing the product: Small teams working with many customers and their related “service oriented” projects.  We are not yet “feature complete” but we’re getting there quickly.

In the next day or two we will adding an RSS option to the Project Blog pages.  RSS may help your team coordinate their activities and maintain momentum as focus changes from task-to-task.  As updates are made across the various projects (tasks completed, comments posted, etc) each person will be automatically notified.

We will be implementing a few new features in the short term that are related to your questions:

1) Activity templates (attach a set of pre-configured items to a Project Blog)
2) Project specific views for projects in the Activity window (like a Gantt report)
3) Task dependencies

If you scan the forums you’ll find that we’re pretty up-front about what we plan to do and not do.  This area is particularly important to us.

We are also seriously reviewing an opportunity to embed an existing process workflow engine (BPM) to help drive some automation throughout the system.  We are looking for common use-case examples and would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Are task dependencies (as mentioned above) currently in place? I am having a bit of a struggle figuring out how best to set up my templates. Im in real estate and want to set up one 30 day escrow template and one 45 day escrow template for my buyers and sellers so I am ready to go when I open my next new deal. Once a new Escrow is opened they generally have a pre-set group of 50+ items that follow the same timeline (at least in california) and with so many tasks (per escrow) that timeline is very critical to follow to ensure a smooth transaction. There are many dependent tasks in this process (example: there is typically a 17 day contingency period from the date the contract is fully executed) so I need to configure a template that starts counting days on the day I open escrow and apply the appropriate template. I see currently Solve lets us apply a task list with tasks that have a actual date to them, but predefined dates won’t work because I am trying to set these up for deals that havent happened yet. I hope that there is a way to do this and I just am overlooking it!

Hi tkfirstteam. Solve360 doesn’t have explicit dependancies or critical paths like MS Project. You should still be able to accomplish what you are trying to do though. Tasklists use relative dates, so this should work well for you. Please see related discussion. http://norada.com/forums/viewthread/638