Housekeeping

Housekeeping support in acGarage lets you perform routine system cleanup tasks automatically. You can tick the tasks you want to carry out in your acGarage profile and we will run them every month on your server.
We plan to add more housekeeping options as we go along. If you have any ideas / suggestions, do let us know. You can use the Feedback tab on right to send us your suggestions.
Till then, here’s how Housekeeping Preferences look in your acGarage profile.

Here is detailed explanation of what each of these options do.

What do these tasks do?

Empty Trash

Purges all deleted items – projects, milestones, tickets, pages, checklists, tasks, time tracking entries, files – everything that you see in Trash within activeCollab. Emptying Trash is a great way to free up some disk space and make activeCollab lighter! We recommend you tick this.

Complete open sub items

This is our favorite! And it needs some explanation! When you complete a ticket, its tasks are not completed by default. This makes sense as you may reopen the ticket in near future. When that happens, it’s easier to manage if previously open tasks are clearly visible / available for completion. Similar thing happens when you complete a milestone. All tickets (and tasks within them) remain open. You may move them to another milestone or reopen the milestone you completed.

Problem arises when such zombie items keep accumulating in the system. You then have a lot of open items that should have been completed but are not. You really wanted a “recursive” complete option!

Recursive completion is what “Complete open sub items (tasks, tickets etc) where parent item (ticket, milestone etc) is already completed” provides. Doing this every months makes a lot of sense, since if you wanted to reopen the item, you may have already done it.

We recommend you tick this option too, unless you have a specific reason not to.

Pause projects without any activity in past 3 months

We don’t like seeing pages full of projects that are inactive, but may become active sometime. Ticking this option will mark those projects as “Paused” that did not have any activity in last 3 months. When you need to activate them, you can easily do that from activeCollab.

Disable system access for users without any activity in past 3 months

Do you have clients / partners / users who participate in certain projects and then don’t need to access the system until next project? Do you have users who left the organization? Do you have top bosses at your client’s organization who wanted to be in loop of the project and track progress, but never made it to use the system?

This option can take care of all that. It will disable system access to all users without any activity in last 3 months. These users won’t be deleted from the system, they will not be able to login to the system.

Bringing them back on board is as simple. Go to their profile and change their role.