Confidential Pages Module will merge with Tickets Plus

this entry has 15 Comments/ in activeCollab, activeCollab Hacks, Modules, News / by Apps Magnet

November 3, 2010

We announced late last week that we plan to release a new module – Confidential Pages – in two weeks. While development was going in full swing we realized:

It will be confusing for users to have a new module for confidential pages
Features provides by Pages – like versioning, tracking changes etc were not that important
Pages functionality is very similar to Tickets
As a matter of fact, it will be very good to have Confidential Tickets
The reason why we wanted a separate module was that it will not create problems for any existing modules. Hacking a core module can cause things to break – e.g. Confidential Tickets may show up in Planning Module
After thinking about this long and hard, we concluded that Confidential Pages Module will be no more.
We will promote Tickets Plus as a first class module for activeCollab (instead of the current “hack” status). This new module will support Confidential Tickets – tickets accessible only by people who are subscribed / assigned to them (and Administrators)
This will also mean less maintenance for us as we have to manage a single product
More importantly, it means Tickets will now pack immense power. Imagine creating tickets that only a specific person in your team can see.

What do you think? Is this wise? Will it make more sense?

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Thomas

In my opinion this module should add options to mark selected discussions, pages, tickets and any selected comments inside them as confidential. I think that this is a missing functionality in aC.

I’m not so much interested in confidential Pages or Tickets (maybe sometimes), but I would really appreciate if it could work with Discussions and selected comments inside it.

Sometimes while I discuss with my clients inside Discussions tab I would like to mark some comments as private/confidential. Sometimes I also want to add new users only to selected discussions – but there is no such functionality in aC.

One more thing – I reallllly appreciate what you are doing guys. I can’t understand why you are expanding aC functionality and not people form aC. Thanks again for all your work!

Cheers,
Thomas
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

Hi Thomas,

Yes, a system wide “Confidential” flag is ideal. That is what we wanted to build – but that would require too many hacks to the core. And like you said, we feel it’s best that activeCollab team does it. So we are not doing it system wide yet.

aC team may take this up. And we will be glad if they do.

In the meanwhile, we plan to go ahead and implement it for tickets.
Shaz

1. Love it, great idea – it should sell like hot cakes. Granular permissions is what makes Sharepoint, Lotus Notes and any other collaboration tool so appealing in a corporate environment.

2. I think the issue is caused by aC itself.
Both ‘Pages’ and ‘Tickets’ have comments, attachments and the ability to assign tasks but only ‘Tickets’ have a status option and only ‘Pages’ have content versioning.

They should just give ‘Tickets’ description versioning (we regularly update the ticket description and lose all changes) and there would be no need for ‘Pages’ at all.

3. If you guys can take it one step further and add attachment versioning to ‘Ticket’ then there would be no need for ‘Files’ either. In fact, attachments would be much better organised in ‘Tickets’ as the ‘Files’ view does not separate the uploads by milestones, only optional categories. This makes it practically useless with 100 files uploaded. If ‘Tickets’ could have versioned attachments then I don’t see why your new module won’t instantly become a must have aC module like ‘Planning’ is.

4. Perhaps your module could have a way to rename Ticket statuses based on the project? Project specific ticket statuses would be very useful for different workflow and processing based projects.

5. You thoughts? Do you think their is a case for eliminating the usefulness of ‘Pages’ and ‘Files’ by combining their unique features into ‘Tickets’?

Cheers,
Shaz

p.s I hope my sleep deprived email ramblings yesterday helped you get to this decision!
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

Hi Shaz,

1. I agree a Confidential Flag at Ticket level can do wonders. As it is, on our own setup, we use Tickets 80% of the time. We use Discussions for project updates (only a single discussion on most projects). Pages are used rarely now and we don’t use Checklists.

2. From aC standpoint, both Pages and Tickets have a status – open / completed. Tickets Plus adds all those additional workflow statuses. Pages are more like a Wiki with version control. Another big difference is that Pages can have sub pages. Both can be useful, but we have found Tickets to be much easier to understand and use.

3. Versioning attachments – haven’t thought about this. Will consider it for future. We use Files for specs and designs. Reference material mostly. I think we need better searching in Files.

4. Project Specific Workflow Statuses – we do not plan to add that in near future. But will consider it for future.

5. I believe Pages and Tickets have a lot of similarities and giving more power to Tickets will be helpful for most users. Both have their own advantages. We would always create tickets for work items and use Pages to store persistent information. I would not eliminate Pages or Files yet…

And yes, your email helped me confirm my decision. I had already started on the implementation, but your email confirmed I was going in the right direction

Thank you!
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

An update on the “confidential” feature:

Making items confidential involves a lot of low level changes. I’ve had to make some hacks to activeCollab core to get this to work. I am working on this and making necessary changes one by one.

We plan to share these hacks with activeCollab team so that they can support confidential items by default. But this may not happen in activeCollab 3.0 (considering how critical access permissions are).

Due to that nature, it’s taking me much longer to iron out confidentiality feature. Will keep everyone posted!

Also want to add a bunch of fixes and enhancements to Tickets Plus. So once confidentiality feature is done, will attack them – and then release the new module.

As Rework says: You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it.
- https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet
  
  Another update to this work!
  
  So this has finally become “Confidential Items Module + Hack for activeCollab”! After a lot of back and forth, iterating over different solutions, I zeroed in on a combination of a module and some core hacks to activeCollab.
  
  The module will allow making almost any project object confidential though. So you can make a ticket / page / discussion confidential. A confidential item will be visible only to people subscribed or assigned to it – or the administrator. All comments, tasks, file attachments to a confidential item will remain confidential too. And yes, even time records will remain confidential!
  
  So you won’t need any agreements modules or private comment modules or anything that does half the job! You will now have a native, familiar way to protect items you want to!
  
  This work is not going to be full proof though. I wanted to minimize the number of core files I needed to change. So I have omitted showing confidential items at a few places – e.g. in Recent Activities or Time Reports etc. But I feel this is still a powerful solution.
  
  More details soon..
  
  :Nirav
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

We are about to save our galaxy using our Confidential Items Module.

Watch out for more…
Shaz

Congratulations on another fantastic module! Your team never ceases to amaze.

+1! Massive props for the Men in Black reference, very creative indeed. I will spread the video far and wide when it comes out 😉

Thanks for the detailed responses too:

1. We use tickets 95% of the time but use aC for both departmental tasks and project tasks. This module and the next version of tickets plus will make our lives so much easier.

2. Ahh ok. I didn’t even realise Tickets plus added those workflow statuses, thought it came with aC. Is there an admin way of changing the workflow values without changing the DB?

3. Given that we use aC for departmental file storage as well, files just don’t give us the organisational flexibility. We prefer to attach them to the relevant ticket and use aC as a pseudo ECM/Document management system.

5. For persistent information we prefer to use tickets without a due date and just keep it open. In that sort of project, milestones serve more of a subfolder/organisational role than their original purpose. If tickets plus ever gets versioning ticket descriptions and versioning ticket attachments then we’d have no use for files and pages (given point 3 for persistent items). I’d the majority of your customers will act in a similar way based on my conversations with other aC’ers

Cheers,
Shaz

P.S Could you add the comment subscribe plugin for WP? Didn’t realise you had made a response until I randomly viewed the same post again.
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

Hi Shaz,

1. Thanks!

2. You can edit tickets_plus_config.php in config folder to add / edit workflow statuses. There is no admin for it yet.

3. Hmm.. Ok.

5. It will be good to see how people use aC. You may want to try using Pages / Discussions for persistent information. I’ve found discussions can too work well if you want to avoid pages.

BTW, just added comment subscribing plugin!

:Nirav
Shaz

Hi Nirav,
2. Thanks!
5. Appreciate the tips. I’ll try to get everyone using them more.

Thanks for adding the subscription plugin, hope it makes your site stickier than it already is!
https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet

Confidential Items Module for activeCollab released. Watch how MIB and Apps Magnet saved our galaxy.
S A

if i’m interested in Confidential Items, should I just wait until you merge Confidential & TicketsPlus?
- https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet
  
  We changed our plans again on this! We planned to release Confidential Pages as a module initially, then planned to merge it with Tickets Plus. So that tickets can be made confidential – which could serve more people. But we also got feedback that people want to make Pages and Discussions too confidential. So finally, we released it as “Confidential Items Module” – which supports making discussions, pages, files and tickets confidential. So it’s an “all-in-one” kind of a module. If you buy Confidential Items module, it can make tickets confidential too – with or without Tickets Plus.
  
  BTW, Tickets Plus will be out as a module with some interesting updates in coming week!
Jorge

Great job! I installed the latest update but my cpanel shows v 1.0 and now I can’t see the confidential option in the frontend.

Any advise in how to fix this?
- https://www.appsmagnet.com Apps Magnet
  
  Please double check that all files are uploaded correctly. If it is still showing version 1.0, files may not have been uploaded to correct folders. After verifying this, you may need to clear the “cache” and “compile” folders in your activeCollab installation. Try again after that.
  
  Let me know how it goes!

Confidential Pages Module will merge with Tickets Plus

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