Track it with Redmine

I have been a religious believer in open source tools. With an advantage of “free of cost”, they offer a pleasant experience to a technical team who want to exploit and extend the power of software. Open source tools are like clay, you could give them different shapes as per your needs. Redmine is one such tool that offers capabilities of online project management, task management, time tracking, defect tracking, knowledge base, document repository, wiki and much more!

Built on Ruby on Rails (popularly known as ROR), the tool is a blend of power, speed and flexibility. Installing and maintaining Redmine is a fairly simple affair – it runs on Webrick (Ruby server) and uses MySQL database. It is light weight and the user interface is delightfully vivid. Mind you, it is cross-platform and cross-database as well.

You could start by setting the application details and then creating projects. Users, roles and permissions follow a straight forward design and are pretty easy to configure. The power of custom workflow definition for each role simply adds so much value. The tool also can be configured to send automatic emails on a wide range of events. Issue (called as Tracker in Redmine) tracking is a primary feature of Redmine. Issues can be categorized into different types like Feature, Task, Defect, etc. Redmine also provides a decent reporting framework that can generate reports of various data sets. Active directory integration is also available so that you don’t have to duplicate usernames and passwords.

You could also manage news, discussion forums and activity tracking in Redmine. It can also integrate easily with popular version control systems like CVS, Mercurial or SVN that makes developers’ lives easier. Project progress can be tracked using Gantt charts or Roadmap. Most of the views in Redmine allow exporting in CSV and PDF formats, so that you don’t spend too much time in figuring out how to exchange information.

Redmine portal hosts a series of plugins, themes and add-ons developed by various supporting developers. These can be used to tweek the tool to maximum possible extent.

My team uses Redmine quite meticulously and we have started reaping the benefits. We are able to pull out automatic progress reports and some metrics that reveal interesting insights into our development cycles. Using Redmine has increased our productivity and at the same time gives substantial transparency to the management and sales teams.

My rating: 5/5

More about Redmine:
Author: Jean-Philippe Lang
URL: http://www.redmine.org/

In LinkedIn

Couple of years ago, I hit upon LinkedIn – I just created my profile then. Over a period of time, the portal has gained due recognition. It is now a placeholder for a ‘global professional profile’. In fact, I can foresee companies asking for LinkedIn profile URL from candidates than their CV/résumé.

My idleness in the portal before was a result of a myth in my mind “It is just another social networking portal”. It was not, it is not! In fact, it is very useful professional networking portal where you could hook up with your colleagues (current as well as previous).

I especially liked the ‘recommendation’ part of LinkedIn, where one could recommend a connected member or get recommended by him/her for a specific employment. The portal also has regular features of a discussion forum, groups, job postings and email exchange. While there is no ingenuity check on profiles, it is still a strong platform to connect to professionals. The portal has one other feature of ‘introduction’ where a member can introduce two connections to each other – and the network grows.

My rating:

4/5