Listing and Finding Tasks

Here's what the other columns mean...

Task Filtering

Why are some tasks bolder, different colors?

If you really care about every task that you have rights to, the menu item Unread by me will come in handy. This will list all tasks entered that you've not yet clicked. In a busy office, this one really does help keep things from being missed.

In this case, if you clicked this one, you would see the 11 things that you've not yet seen.

You can "unbold" tasks by selecting more than one, then clicking the "I read it" icon. If you read it, but want to pretend that you didn't you could click them, then click the other icon.

Working With Tasks

Assuming you know what it's like to enter a task, now let's look at what it takes to work with them. By working with them, we mean adding comments, attachments, delegating to others and, the ultimate objective, closing them.

After you log into your website, the Task menu should appear looking perhaps something like what you see to the left.

On a daily basis, most of use are concerned with what's expected of us. The question we all ask, "What do I need to finish?"

You will notice the numbers to the right of some of the menu items. As you might guess, this is the number of task records in that group. So in this case, the person who logged in has 12 items waiting for them.

By clicking Assigned to me, a list of 12 tasks will be displayed that might look something like this:

Working with a single task

The Four Areas of a Task Record

1. Filter - For now, we're going to ignore this one because it deals with something other than learning what a task is. (This one is about finding tasks, rather than learning how to manage one)

2. Header - The header of the task is where you find all that stuff you entered when you created it. It's all pretty self-explanatory so for now, we'll just assume you can figure out what all those fields mean.

3. Tabs - Each task record has four tabs above the Comments box. By default, a task record will show all the comments that are attached to the task.

What's a task comment?

In the completion of any task, communication is required. This usually happens in the form of questions and answers. A comment is either of those. As part of the Q&A process, attachments are often used to define or clarify and those too will appear as comments in the task history.

An attachment isn't really a comment, but we include it as one so it's1 clear where an attachment was added in the "task conversation" When you include an attachment, here's what it looks like:

To view all attachments for a task... you would click the Attachments tab. When you upload an attachment, you are asked for a filename (via a browse button) and a short description. By default, all attachments will appear in the history section as a comment.

4. History The history area of a task record is the part that can get lengthy. In the above example, there were 16 comments made to that task. Comments are listed in most-recent-first order, so when wanted to understand the full history of a task, you'll need to read from the buttom-up.

Timelogs

Timelogs is a feature we created to support invoicing. At least for us, we use Taskhopper to feed our billing system. At the end of each period, TH can produce a summary of hours accumulated. Within the task header, you will see a tally of total hours used.

How do you log time? Another good question. If a task is assigned to you, the header of the task changes a bit. It will include a few more fields so you can record your contribution to it's successful completion. Here's what you will see:

Realtime is used like this: Your life is spent in an office and you have an internet connection. You get a call, you create the task and assign it to someone else. They open the task, enter what they're doing to help, then click Start. Taskhopper opens what's called a timer record and starts the clock. When that person is done doing whatever, the click stop and the time is added to the task.

This process continues until someone believes the task is done.

Unrealtime mode, it would mean you went off and completed some amount of work, then came back, logged into TH to post that time. It takes a few more clicks to do this, but it's still pretty quick. If people gruble that it takes too much time, it usually means they didn't do any work or they're just not very good clicking a mouse.

Resources - Logging Time

By default, the Assigned_to person is the one who is supposed to log time against a task. So going back to the header of the task, the person in yellow is able to bill time against a task.

But in the real world, more than one person is often part of the task completion process. If you want multiple people to contribute time to a task, and you have lots of tasks, then Taskhopper is perfect for you!

When others need to work on the same project AND record their time, two things must happen first:

1. They must be given rights to the project
2. They are added as a resource to the task

Remember that TH requires every Joomla user to be given specific rights to projects before they can do anything with them... even see them. i.e., If someone registers on your site, they might be able to see the task menu, but none of the actually tasks will be visible. (More about this in the Admin section of the tour)

Once a person has rights to a project, then they (or others) can add them as a resource. This is pretty easy to do. If you already have rights to the project, then you can just click this button:

You can guess what this does

If you are an admin and want to assign Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, then just select the names from the dropdown and click Add. (or in this example, it might be Peter, Zsolt, Gabor and Attila)

Ok, two more items and that's enough for this page!

How Much Time Should A Task Consume?
On some tasks you may want to let the task person know how much time you want them to spend so we included an estimated hours field. It doesn't really do anything other than letting others know how big a task it is. In a volunteer organization, it would be useful to be able to pick tasks based on size. e.g., "I would like to do a task that takes < 2 hours" ... but we never got around to implementing this.

Changing Header Information
Our GUI design skills need a bit of work, we know that. The DELETE button is ten times bigger than the edit... so that's one of our things we plan to improve in version 2. Until then, this is all you need to remember:

Before we begin... this is only a tour, not an instruction manual. It's to give you a flavor of what Taskhopper is, so there are lots of screenshots that never made it to this page.

All task managing starts with a login...

The Joomla login page... we all know how that works

After login, you will see the Taskhopper menu

The four components of Taskhopper are:

1. The menu
2. Task jumper
3. Open timelogs
4. Taskers online

If you don't care about keeping track of time spent, then you can ignore #3. (We included this to support invoicing)

If you are only using Taskhopper by yourself, then #4 can be ignored. Some people actually use Taskhopper to manage their own list of to-dos, however that really wouldn't be the best use of this as the good part of task management is being able to delegate and share. If you have 5 people all working on tasks at the same time, you'll see five names along with their location/department and what time is is where they live.

Task Jumper(2) is just a quick way to get to a task by entering the task ID number.

The menu (1)... that's really the only one you need.

Adding A New Task

Let's assume that you are already a registered user and someone (the admin) has given you permission to Taskhopper projects. To create a new task, you would click the add new link.

It's Not Pretty

Taskhopper is not an attractive product. We realize that and we plan to fix that in version 2. However, ugly as it may be, it works. The new task screen has a maximum of 13 fields. Some of them are optional, others will default. A minimum of five fields must have something entered.

The five mandatory fields are indicated in yellow. All the others can be left in their default state.

e.g.,

If you don't assign a task to someone, it will default to the manager of that project.

By default, everything is not very urgent... just like in real life

The Five Mandatory Fields

1. Summary - This is the title of the task. Should be something maybe three words or less. "Server is down" "Graphic needed: ProjectX" "Call customer: Fred" would be good examples of what a summary might look like.

2. Projects - A Taskhopper project is anything that you want to assign to a manager, or whatever you call the person accountable for something. e.g., If you were building a house, your projects could be Concrete, Carpentry, Electrical, Plumbing, Roofing... and each would go to the person in charge of that skilled trade. If you are a non-profit org, they might be things your group is sponsoring for the community. e.g., Apple Festival, Golf Outing, Bake Sale, Fund Raising... The image to the left was taken from an online store.

In a consulting role, projects are normally Client-Project. e.g,. If you're helping Acme Widgets build Product X, then Acme-X might be a project. The good side of this is that you can track cost/effort by client project, the downside is that you'll need to add things together should you ever want to paint the big picture for a single client.

The important point here is that projects should be about the ONE PERSON that is responsible for that activity because all tasks can generate email notications which should let someone know something needs doing. What good is requesting something if nobody knows about it? Of course you can assign tasks to others, which is normal in even small groups.

Taskhopper projects are visible only to users that have been given specific access by the admin. e.g., If you are the admin of a Taskhopper site for your office, you could also offer your employees/users a way to track their own lists, things only they would see. (This is both a feature and a downside because if you have lots of users, then you'll have lots of maintenance as projects come and go.)

3. Item Type - This is to group things together so you can see how time is being spent. Important point here is that item types are not sensitive to the project. What this means is that TH isn't much good if you're trying to run a bakery and software design shop. (well, maybe you could ... because a bakery might have bugs)

Also, users see all item types, so try to keep these generic to whatever business/operation TH is supporting.

4. Action Needed The first version of TH didn't have this because we assumed, heck... if I entered the task, someone should just go ahead and do it. But that's not the case. Sometimes you just want to record something or ask someone to schedule it. "Do it now" is often not the default. If you are only recording FYI for something, the Info Only option will remove the date fields as FYI tasks have no due date.

5. Details This is where you can get verbose, but try to resist that. If you have a long bunch of stuff that needs doing, put that into a separate doc and attach it. Details should be a few sentences, something that can be read in a few seconds. Another reason to keep it short is that formatting is lost if you copy/paste.

Email Notifications

After you save a task, an email notication is generated and sent to the default manager of that project. Notifications can contain lots of information so for this reason, be careful if you're using TH to store sensitive info like IDs or passwords. Here's what one might look like:

One quick note about the urgency field... anything entered with urgency=low does not generate a notification. (We did this because most of the time the task is not something people need to know about immediately)

Also, of course you can change the content of this message. All of these are template based so you can add/remove whatever you want to customize the message for your business. Here's what templates look like.

When are notifications sent? Good question. They are generated each time something changes. e.g., New, update, closed, reopened... and each notification type has it's own template. And yes, you can make the subject line less verbose. It's shown here with all possible fields included.

Attachments

It's common that a task will need some supporting documentation. In our world, much of the time we include a JPG to show how something is either wrong, or how it should look when it's fixed. Should this be necessary, you can include one file with the new task.

It will accept any type of file and if you need to attach more, just do that after you have submitted the initial task.

After you have entered at least five fields of information, to save the task you would click the same Joomla-looking icon that should be mostly habit for most. (the big red X is not really necessary as the BACK button would do the same thing)

That's about all there is to adding a new task. We could say lots more, but this was only intended to give you a taste of what it's like working with TH.

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Demo Home | Working with Tasks | Finding Tasks | Taskhopper Home

Taskhopper 1.1 Install Sheet

This is some basic information about how to get Taskhopper 1.1 up and running. We've put this into a simple layout so it's easy to print. We'll make it better as time permits. Currently, we are only offering the product to Joomla webmasters, so hopefully this is more than enough to get started. Below you will find the install portion. Front-end operation will be added soon.

If you have anything you would like to add, of course we would be very grateful for any input. Please do not hesitate to offer suggestions.

If you're looking for a demo, CLICK HERE

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Introduction

Taskhopper, is a ticket system/project management tool that's simple and easy to use. Althought it was created with software development/support in mind, It can be adapted to fit different industries. It can help manage multiple tasks for multiple people, located in multiple places.

Taskhopper is a Joomla/Mambo component. It was created initially in Mambo, and then migrated to Joomla 1.0.12. It has been tested within a number of different templates and we find it works best with variable width layouts. Everything from RocketTheme seems to work just fine.

Installation

Taskhopper is delivered in multiple ZIP files. These are found on the download page. You click each one, and save them to your hard drive. Then open up Joomla and run the installer for the one component file and the four modules. (The component for 1.1 is about 117K, the modules are tiny, all under 3K each)

Installers>Components

Select Package file: com_thopper

Make sure media, administrator/components, components and images/stories are all Writeable

Do the same for the four modules: mod_thsearch, mod_thopper, mod_thonline and mod_thtimelog

Installers>Modules

Make sure media, administrator/modules, and modules are all Writeable

If you received a Success message after each install, then the base files have been loaded.

That's it! You should now be ready to configure...

Troubleshooting: We have encountered a few hosts that do not allow any install scripts to run. This is not a Taskhopper bug but rather an Apache configuration issue. (We concluded this because on the same host, Taskhopper would install fine on some servers, not at all on others. Also, we heard from one hosting company they don't allow that because of security reasons.)

Configuration

This documentation was written for those who might be installing components and modules for the first time. It's also written as though you're building a site specifically to manage tasks. If you are installing TH into an existing site with a specific layout, some of these instructions may not apply. In that case, just ignore them!

Here's what you'll need to do:

• Change module access rights
• Change menu names
• Add a company
• Define your categories
• Define timelog types
• Add some projects
• Assign rights to users
• Set options (name your system, default guest tickets...)
• Edit the subject and body templates
• Edit the TH english.php file to customize it to how you say things

Make Modules - Change Access and Publish

In most installs, Taskhopper should be non-public. In other words, users must be logged in to see the task menu. However, a guest is able to submit an item without being logged in. (We'll address that later.) First, let's make the back-end changes needed to start using the system.

Change Menu Names (optional)

Find the three modules (all starting with TH) and rename them to whatever you feel appropriate. Obviously, this is fully optional -- you can call them whatever you like. Change access on all Taskhopper modules to Registered if you want Registered level users to be able to use the system. If you'll be using Author and above, then set them to Special. If you don't yet have any users online to worry about, go ahead and publish each of them as well.

Add Company

Taskhopper was designed to support multiple clients/companies. So think of this in terms of any service related industry where multiple clients sustain the business. To start, just add your own company as there will always be an on-going flow of things that need to be done in-house to support various overhead needs.

Note: Taskhopper is currently a single-industry application. What that means is if you run a business that does landscaping and software development, the projects and categories will likely not fit too well. (Well, I guess Bug Fix could also mean getting rid of garden pests) In other words, categories are not project-specific.

Add Categories

Categories are the specific types work that will be done within projects. For software support or development, you might have something like this:

• Bug Fix
• Change Request
• Graphics
• Install/Config
• Domain/DNS
• Hosting
• Documentation

If your business is landscaping,

• Pickup/Deliver
• Cut lawn
• Landscape design
• Move dirt
• Cleanup

You get the idea.

Define your Timelog types

Fully optional is the ability for Taskhopper to keep track of how long it takes to accomplish whatever it is your task doers are doing. If you can make this work, then you run a very tight ship and you are to be commended. What you do here is indicate the type of work your people will be doing to respond to a task. Often this is connected to a rate scale. e.g,. Tech writing, database design, graphics, copy writing, painting, drywalling, dirt hauling... whatever it is your people do, list them here.

When a person starts a task, they can start a timer, then close the timer when finished. Obviously, this only works if the work is done while Taskhopper is sitting in front of them. For dirt hauling or fish cleaning, it's probably not going to be a realtime event. (In that case, they can still open a timer, then close and edit the total time to reflect just how long it took to move that dirt)

Add Projects

Before adding projects, make sure you have at least a few Joomla users. Each project needs a manager, and the manager dropdown list will come from the Joomla users table.

Each project needs these:

Name, Order, Show, Manager, Company, Agent, Status

Name of the project: This depends how you're using Taskhopper. If you're a software company, this could be Redesign Widget X, in landscaping, it could be the address of the property where work is being done. How your business handles project work will determine how you create your project list.

Order: In the current release, all projects are listed in alphabetical order -- so this isn't used. (Still, you will need to assign a value. Sorry)

Show: If you want the project to appear in the dropdown list, enable this.

Manager: This is the person to whom unassigned new requests will be routed. Upon receiving a notification of a new request, the manager can login, click Unassigned and assume responsibility for the new item or delegate to someone else.

Company: This allows work requests to be grouped together to support invoicing or other back end processes where all activity for a company or department need to be reported.

Agent: You can ignore this for now. It's for a future release.

Status: Currently we have Planning, Active, Completed, On Hold and Cancelled. Only Planning and Active projects will appear in the front-end. This allows you to create multiple phases of an entire effort, but only show those portions that are current.

Credit Hours: The concept here is to allow project managers to assign a specific number of hours allocated for this project phase. When making an assignment to someone, it is important they understand the budget estimate for the entire project. In the next release, timelog hours in any task will be deducted from the total credit hours in the project. As new tasks are added for the same project, the balance will be visible.

Assign Rights to Users

After a few projects have been created, and assuming you have users in the system who you want to associate with projects, now you are ready to assign projects.

This is one of the "less attractive" portion of Taskhopper -- we realize this and plan to address it soon. We have released it in this state to gather input from people like you. Ideally, we'll be doing something that's group-based, but for now, you'll need to assign individual rights to each person for each project.

Click Users will bring up a list of all users in your system. If you're mixing Joomla users with non-Taskhoppers, then the list will show you names you don't care about. This was one of the debates we had prior to this release. Should registered users appear here? Well, they do. Anyone in your Joomla user table will appear here.

For anyone not handling tasks, just ignore them and they will not be able to see anything that goes on within the TH system. (However, if you make your modules Registered, then Registered users will see those modules -- even though none of the task items will be visible. If you want to separate those, you could allow non-TH'ers to be Registered, then set the modules and all TH'ers to Special (Authors or above)).

Because Taskhopper was built for people in different locations, the first configurable item in the user rights record is their location. When people are online handling requests, their location and their current time will appear. If everyone happens to be in the same location, let's say it's being using to run a political campaign, the location field could be used to indicate their title. Then you might see something like, Fred (Public Relations) in the TH Online module.

Once you have assigned all the necessary rights, click the update and that person will be able to manipulate those aspects of the projects.

Set Taskhopper defaults (Options)

Next go to Components>TaskHopper and select Options from the Administrator Menu. Here you will have three fields to complete:

	System name
	Reply to address
	Where to send guest requests

The system name is whatever your site is about. We could have grabbed the site name from the Joomla DB, but we wanted to give you the flexibility to call it something specific, perhaps a subset of whatever the site is about. If Taskhopper is being used to help a local person get elected to a public office, then Frank For Mayor might be the system name. If this is a support component within a client's site, then Client_Name Support. This will appear as from From item in email notifications.

Reply to address is the email address that will be used in the event users hit REPLY to a notification. No, Taskhopper does not currently monitor an email address to automatically append (or start) new items. The email notification is only a convenience so you know something has changed in the system. (You might want to start all notifications with PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS ... unless of course you're ok with them replying.

Where to send guest requests is the default project that guest items will go to. For something like this, it's best to add a project that is controlled by a person in charge of all projects. They can then reassign/delegate the item after reviewing.

Changing notification messages

Each time something changes in Taskhopper, at least two email notifications are sent: 1.) The owner and 2.) The person to whom the work was assigned. (If there is not assigned_to, then it goes to the manager of that project)

Messages are all template based so you can customize for your industry/language/style.

You'll find these files in:

components/com_thopper/inc/template

Here you will find eight text files. The default will have some generic layout, something that's usually good enough for testing purposes. However you will want to modify these based on who will be the recipients of these notifications. (Here are some samples)

Tip: On some hosts, the use of a Joomla installer script will assign file rights to Apache. In this case, you will not be able to modify any files/dirs installed for Taskhopper. If you send a note to your host, you can ask them to assign these files to you. In our next release, we'll include a utility to overcome this potential issue.