OK, so thanks for joining.
The next presentation, the next talk, will be open projects, a review of the latest features
and innovation by Will and with Lidon Thal.
Yeah, thank you.
This morning, I saw you are doing the latest and greatest of the next cloud and that was
really intimidating.
So, bear with me today, this now has not the same level and quality of an ease and
shownness of the presentation anyways.
So thank you for letting me give you a little review of the latest features and innovations
that we had in built and integrated into open project in the last year.
So since the last first term, 2024, but made a quick introduction while it's open project
is a collaborative project management environment that can do both classic project management
as well as agile and combined the two into a hybrid solution.
Hands up who does not know open project.
OK, there's not so many of this cool.
So then this is the right form because it actually just talks about what's new.
Before we can talk about what's new at open project, we need a little bit to look at
who's building open project and there's actually quite some news.
Now in the last year alone, we added 13 people to the team, brilliant people, but you
know, like we come from this from a size of a company or organization where everyone
was everyone, everyone knows who knows what and we needed to find a new, where new organization
how we can distribute responsibilities, road maps and also like focus simply focus in the
company.
So we introduced something that is called streams.
So basically it means like instead of having one big chunk of people, we said there's
a team for this team for that, every stream is in charge of a strategic goal, a strategic
idea of open project and then everyone can have his own road, little road map, a smaller
one that is controllable, that is more easier to understand, we can better prioritize what
is important in every single, in every single smaller road map.
So we have a road map here for that stream, another road map.
And these streams, they work on these streams work on features and they built and have a feature
ready when it's ready.
In the years before we had like four bigger releases in year, so we had to wait until all
the features are ready so that we can prepare that only thing, that baby that we are
giving birth to, and we changed that now completely because there are too many events popping
up in every stream like this, features ready, this feature is ready.
So what we simply do is now every month release.
And that's every month, a baby, based on something like that, interesting, was the good
side of that?
Well, the bad side is pretty stressful, all the QA and all that stuff.
The good side of this is people can simply develop in these streams and they're ready
when they're ready and it will be released at that moment.
The good thing is also that with these quicker and earlier releases, you get more feedback
in and you can drop the little tiny roadmiss that I was talking about faster.
So the feedback comes in and we adopt our roadmap in every stream, according to it,
and of course people wait less for the new stuff to arrive.
What was also very important in 2024 is it's not a small thing, it's actually a pretty
big thing, that was the release of Open Desk and Open Desk for those that don't know
is a initiative by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, providing a sovereign workplace.
Alternative to Office 365, where actually known software opens also up and has worked together
to provide one alternative, and we're pretty involved there, and that you can imagine
if you integrate with next cloud or with elements or X-Liki, then you're busy with designing
and thinking about those integrations to get them going.
So there was a huge last year and it still is.
So my presentation will go a little bit long, those streams, the development streams that we
have and show a little bit of things.
The one thing that we came up actually was induced by one of our bigger partners in clients
the city of Kalon, they have 5,000 projects at the same time, it's like that is a lot.
And of course if you're a user of such an environment, you want to mark those that
important to you, just to mark them favorite, so we got that in and it's much easier now
to navigate the project list for them.
But they also are hungry for more, so as I said, like 5,000 projects, how do you manage
that?
It's like, you know, before that we were managing projects, the task, the project plans,
inside of our project, and now suddenly we need to manage sets of projects.
So the requirements they brought to us were like, yeah, we need to track who's the
product, a project owner, we need to know when it's the start and the end, we need to know
the risk, so all sorts of other attributes that they need to attach to a project in order
to make it manageable, for example, is that a new kindergarten or bridge that new project
is that an energy saving project.
So we made open project now, yeah, you could configure it, have attributes that you can
see it here on the right-hand side, whatever you need, you can put there as a attribute
of a project, and then later, of course, you can also filter on them, save that filter,
that query, give it a name, make it a query for yourself, make it a query for everyone
or just shared with individuals.
So that makes it easier to control a whole set of projects and to know what you need to
find out.
We will continue to go ahead, things that will come will be more like portfolio management,
also like a canvas where you can see access, and by prioritizing projects against each other,
recording to whatever value you choose, and yeah, the end game would be really like resource
management and people assignment, but that's stuff that needs to come step by step.
Another stream would be, which is a bit more known here at the first time I've been talking
about this in the last two years here, it's like the document workflows, formerly known
also as the next cloud integration team, and yeah, basically from the next cloud integration,
where we have, we link workpacks and tasks and open projects, two files and folders in
next cloud, and where we also do more stuff like we provide special project folders in next cloud
that are accessible, we manage the access directly via memberships and open project, or having
project templates with template tasks linked to template files in next cloud.
Yeah, we basically took that thing and were asked by a client, I can tell the name because
it's a happy sponge, a Deutsche Bahn, to adopt that to SharePoint. Without okay, that could be
interesting, the SharePoint is the big player of fire management, and maybe it would open
us doors to get, you know, like the barrier down to get, you know, the rear of the first,
let's say open source application in the environment that can still use this stuff, they don't
need to change the whole thing at the same time. There was the idea, and the, you know,
in the hindsight, not the same buzz, you know, it was much cooler to integrate with next cloud,
the values are more aligned, and yeah, afterwards we were cleverer, but it was a huge project,
and there's a huge nice piece of code, my, my people did a great job there, but yeah,
anyways, let's move forward to something that is really having energy. In, yeah, in, that are them,
when you're having meetings, or when you think of meeting agendas, like let's think about this
for a second, are you prepared? Do you bring relevant stuff? When do you know what to bring?
So for example, an open project where you have a plan, or you organize work, and you come across
a question at some point, and then this, this point, and time, you say, I should bring it to
the next meeting. We should discuss it there, right? And we build something, the meetings module,
we can simply say you can see here an epic, which is an work package. It can simply
take that work package to the next meeting, by choosing what meeting you want to, to bring it on
the agenda. So it's out of your head, you know, it's there, you will talk about it, fine, you can
leave a comment cool. But then this iteration one, then the iteration two comes in, like, yeah,
but the agenda is not yet created. So annoying to create the agenda first, and then going back to
the work package and adding it. So we implanted something, it's called recurring meetings,
or meeting serious. So you simply say, have a weekly, have a terrific, and these meetings come
again and again. I don't need to think about them. I can simply pick them again. The next time
I'm at the work package, it's super easy to fill those meetings that are often empty,
have empty agendas, suddenly have worth interesting and really topics that have a question.
And when you're in the meeting, then you also see that there's a work package.
Oh, that's the context, the question is about everyone can, in the meantime,
why they're bored and looking into the screen, they can click, click around, find out what
it's actually going on. What was discussed, discussed before. So it's everything meetings,
and tasks, and plans are integrated. And there's something that has keeping continue,
we keep updating and proving with every release. That's a really powerful thing we use ourselves.
This one is like, what is it like? Is it an IT crowd? Excuse me, are you from the past?
The planning and reporting, of course we have an open project there, but always had the
opportunity to break down work packages and to support packages and so on. And you could also
say how much work something was, but the calculations to sum it up, you know, to sum the whole
tree of a work was flawed, head bugs. And it was never really prioritized enough because it
is complex to fix. So we spent 2024 quite an extensive time in the planning reporting stream
to fix it. I was pretty tough now, but now you can say, okay, this thing takes that much time,
we already did that much and it accumulates all upwards to meaningful numbers. And yeah,
we're proud that we can finally afford it, you know, like the company has that side to fix
all stuff that has been around for so long. And another one that was asked from the community a lot
is okay, adding to work package relationships, like a follower and proceeds, you sometimes
don't want them to be directly following, let's say you build a basement of a house with concrete,
it needs to dry right before you can put up the walls. So that time distance, that's called lag.
Now our relationships, much relationship model allows that to model that into into your project plan,
and again, visitor from the past, people asked us so often, could we please export gunshots
as PDF so that we can print them? Why it's that? We can put them into some meeting materials,
we have put the link. Whatever, there's a thousand of reasons they finally got the PDF export
for the gunshots. I don't know what they do with it, but they got it. That one is really nice,
that's the thing that is basically coming out of my hands. You know, in our team, people use
element for chatting, for exchanging real-time messages, and that was always wondering why are
they doing this, you know, like they're talking about work, they don't have the context of the work,
like, what is the task that they're working on? What does it belong to? And what happens actually
to the discussion the next day? I don't know. I don't find stuff in messages. Maybe I'm not
skilled enough, maybe I'm from the past, but I don't find information there. So discussions are
going, which is also good and nice feature times, that you can, you know, things are volatile,
and fly off. We said, okay, let's turn that around. Let's take the open project,
notifications, and then make it a little bit more messenger-like. So with one more, it's
15, oh, I think. We changed it so that you have more, like, something like a GitHub pull request,
a formal style of KV, that the changes in a work package, combined with a feeling of a chat,
so you type something and it moves up, and also when somebody else writes something, it comes in
automatically. Or what is faster to respond to a good comment than just giving a thumbs up?
I've read it, I've understood it, and I agree. Just a thumbs up. We didn't have it, we simply had
it simple text form back before that, and I had to fight a lot of fights internally and externally
to get this into open project, because people were scared that it would lose the contractual
way of commenting on work packages. The formality. Yeah, but then you go to the messenger
to have not be formal, right? So yeah, so we worked on that, and we will continue working this
next thing should be, like, reply functions and threats and so on. And then still, we will need
to have the messengers, and we will still need to have these rooms where you can say, hey,
today am I childish sick, I need to stay at home. Another one, convenious feature is a very simple,
you know, just you need to remember something, and you don't want it to this actively,
you don't want to put it into a can, and just set an alarm, and then you will get an notification
once it's there. There's actually also a sponsor by the city of Kalon.
Also, community in a contribution, at least in the beginning, there's the GitLab integration,
so the idea is to, you have the project management environment or working project, where you can
support the whole organization, and then you have the software development part,
which is just one aspect of the whole organization, let's say you're marketing,
you wouldn't have marketing in GitLab, right? But in GitLab is optimized for code management,
you're working on code, I don't need to tell you, but with that integration, you can simply link
merch requests with work packages, so that you know, okay, if that work package is an epic,
a feature, a bug, you can know in what merch request it is built on, and what is the status of
that merch request? Is it already, I don't know, how did the pipelines run, is PCI green, and so on?
That's really, really nice feature. As you might have noticed, open credit change a little bit
and they look in fear lately, in the last two years, and the reason is we adopted the GitHub's
open source design system called Primer, and GitHub also, and the same as GitLab is Ruby
and Rails application, so as we are, and by adopting to their front, and it was easy also to adopt
to their accessibility features. One of them is that you can easily have a high contrast mode,
and that came actually through that Primer approach, and the good thing about that is also,
we could finally get a dark mode. Yeah, that was nice. Thank you, Henrietta.
That turns out more features that we implemented in 2024. One more thing that's worth noting
is a custom field. You know, custom fields are these fields that you can add to work package,
and store some additional data. We already have like, I don't know, strings, numbers, lists,
what was missing was a hierarchy, a tree, and so you can have like a department structure.
You know, every organization has a department structure, or a skill structure, or a building,
or a place structure, okay, this office in the town, and this building, and that floor, that room.
All these things that you can now do with custom field of type hierarchy.
Yeah, anyways, what is up in 2025?
Cliffinger. We are working on a mobile app, and it's already internally in alpha version.
It's not yet in that shape that we want to present it to the outside world, but we're working on
it, and we also fighting internally about what is actually the best use case for it, so if you
have strong opinions about it, please come to me. And if you're a flutter developer, please come to
me as well. We need help there. That's another baby of mine. For 2025, we just had this discussion
here about integrations, and I talked about the technical fundamentals that need to be solved in order
to make integrations between rich applications that have users easier. And I really, really,
promote that we stick to a couple of standards when it comes to integrating applications,
and especially users, because it's incredibly hard. It's incredibly expensive, and it blocks
all the good initiatives, the all the great ideas that we have, and it's okay, it would be cool to have
that application plus that application, the one plus one equals three thingy.
Yes, but having the fundamentals, not there, makes it really, really hard and expensive to get going.
And you do shortcuts that are not fun, that are not good. You leave security, you don't do the
right thing. So what I promote here and what we're actually doing is building a couple of
implementing a couple of open standards. Let's say OIDC, job tokens, token exchange,
the OAuth token exchange, and for user provisioning, this can protocol. If we have those things,
then we can basically orchestrate when is a user available by provisioning. And it can be in a moment
where in someone creates a user, a guest user, a user that I won't plan to work with in the
future, and that user doesn't know it yet, but I already assigned tasks to that person.
And I already need to prepare that the full is accessible in next cloud. We also need to solve
that once that person boards on and does the first login, it doesn't want. It doesn't need to
think about open project or next cloud or whatever, because it's too much in the first day of
work, what did the application MIA and I don't care. I'm in open desk, open desk. Yeah, what is
next level is open, probably you can hardly see. So we need to solve that. And fortunately,
we're working together with next cloud and with open desk and other vendors to at least in this
group of people to establish these standards here. That's something that is for me very, very
from the heart, because last year we struggled a lot. We're making it to make it really
user-friendly at the end. Then of course, further integrations, we want to integrate with Exleaky
to take a little bit the adlation monopoly of Confluence and Jura. So yeah, Exleaky is the
Confluence and open project is the Jura. In that case, I'll expect something to come in 2025.
And remember, integrated with stronger. Thank you.
Thank you, Villand. We have two minutes for questions. Any question?
Wow, no question. It was crystal clear.
Yes.
Hi, I have a question about the mobile app. Is it designed for smartphone only or for tablets too?
Because I think it's an interesting use case to use such tool on tablet.
Yeah, I agree. It is actually designed to also work on desktop.
But yeah, let's take it step by step. So first thing would be mobile. Many people have
mobile but don't have a desktop computer and teams work distributed on a mobile setting.
And we would start there. I know it is exactly what you are talking about. For example,
from a construction site, you usually have tablets because you want to see plans and so on. But
then you have the simple workers that just need to get a task. It depends a little bit on what is
of first use case. And it's probably the communicator part. It's just getting messages resolved
and out of your inbox. The interesting thing to hear your use case later, we can talk.
Yeah. In my company where we are a engineering firm, we are using extensively open project
for organizing our work flows. It was really useful for the review process. That the task goes
from a project, from a designer to a reviewer. And we use the custom actions with buttons to
approve or reject. And it was really useful. So thank you for this jewel.
And I am interested in what you say about the new features, about the planning of the resources
and assignment to people. That will be useful for the management to know how much a single person
is doing what it's planned to do. Yeah. The question here is, what are our plans for resource management
now? And there is, we are not yet there. We do first do with a portfolio management. They can
break it down and you need to assign resources later to projects or to phases of a project.
Probably not on a work package level. So the idea would be to help people to get an idea
how do they have enough people? Are they overworked? Are they overbooked? That is the kind of
question that we would like to solve there. But we are not yet in that position.
Thanks for some match we learned. Well, we don't have any more time for questions. So I think
that if you have any other questions, you can ask in directly in the whole way. Thank you very much.