OpsAdminManual

Introduction

You can use OpsAdmin to create and manage projects and get reports based on the time logs and project estimates (time budget). OpsAdmin is currently available in Dutch and English, the language of the interface depends on your browser settings.

OpsAdminconsists of 4 tabs:

• Home - homepage with some general information
• Select Project - search for stored projects
• Create Project - create new project or update existing project
• Reporting

Manage projects

Select a project

You can search for existing projects by (part of) project name and/or status "active", "closed" or both (leave blank or select both). Selecting a project takes you to the tab where you can update project properties.

Minimal Project

The OpsAdmin web interface lest you create new projects and edit existing projects. Every project should have at least a name. When you save a new project or change an existing project's name, the project name is checked against existing projects to assure that the name is unique. You will not be able to save the project if it is not, you will get a error message telling you to change the project name.

When you create a new project it's status is automatically set to "active". (Users of the OPS Timesheet extension to can filter available projects by status.) A number of project properties is automatically generated when you create or update a project:

• mail folder
• start and end date
• guid

The project's shared mail folder is named after the project, with any characters that are not allowed in mail folder names removed. This means that the project's mail folder is not always identical to the project name. The mail folder name has to be unique, if the project's name would result in a duplicate mail folder name you will get an error message prompting you to change the project name.

The project's start and end-date are selected automatically: the start-date is the date you created the project and the end-date is the date you closed the project. Opening a closed project wipes the end-date, the new end-date will be the date you close the project again.

A project GUID is generated automatically for each new project, it identifies the project across all of the ops components.

Time Tracking and Mail: project members and tasks

With the web interface you can manage project members and tasks, this is the meat and potatoes OpsAdmin. Project members have access to the projects shared mail folder and can log time to the project's active tasks.

Members and Manager

With OpsAdmin you can add people (from the OpsProject group you configured) as project members. Once a project is stored you can no longer remove project members (because they may have already logged time to a project task). Every project member can use their OPS enabled mail client (see OpsEmailThunderbirdExtension) to read the project mail and to assign emails to the project.

Project members can also use their OPS enable timesheet client (see OpsTimesheetPlugin ) to log time to the project's active tasks.

OpsAdmin allows you to keep track of who the current project manager is. Note that the project manager will not have access to the project mail folder and cannot log time on the project tasks, unless he/she is also a project member. You can change the project manager any time (to reflect the actual situation, of course).

Tasks

Project tasks are grouped under quote tasks, ie 'what the costumer was promised'. Quote tasks have a time estimate and actual implementation tasks. Implementation tasks have two time estimates: total and todo. Estimates are displayed in hours, with 2 decimal places (2 and a half hours = 2.5).

Set the implementation task status to "active" if you want to enable project members to log time to this task. One of the available report styles ("project") allows you to compare the budgeted time for an implementation task with the actual spent and todo time.

Exceptions

OpsAdmin requires a working ldap backed and a working IMAP server. You will not be able to use OpsAdmin without a working ldap back-end and if the mail server is down you will be able to do only reporting (but to create or update projects).

Reporting

Options

With OpsAdmin you can get reports from the project members' timelogs. You can narrow down reporting by any combination of:

• Time-frame
• Person
• Project

If there are no timesheet entries matching your query, the report will be empty. Unlike the language setting, the locale for currency and decimal convention is configured during setup. The available locales are NL (€ 1.000,00) and US (US$ 1,000.00).

Four kinds of reports are available but you can add your own:

• basic is a chronological list of all timesheet entries - example
• project is a detailed project report, allows you to compare time spent on tasks with the original time budget
• projects-total shows time spent per project - example
• servicedesk shows (for each project) the timesheet entries and the expenses (time and money) per month - example

Note that projects-total is intended to let you compare time spent on different projects, you should not select a project when choosing this option. All the other report styles report on one project, if you don't select a project, you will get as many reports as there are projects (for your query). The reports will still be on one page, separated by a horizontal rule.

If you want to create your own reports style, check this page: OpsAdminAddStylesheet

Exceptional cases

OpsProject problems

OpsAdmin reporting requires the Ops project server to run. If OpsProject is not available you will not be able to get a report. Also if any kind of error or exception occurs at OpsProject, you will get a general error message in the reporting tab of OpsAdmin. The solution in this case is to go over the OpsProject error logs and/or to check the OpsProject configuration. A known problem is that a OpsAdmin administrator is not in the group configured as required_role for OpsProject and as such cannot use reporting. If this is the case, it will be clear from the OpsProject logs. The solution is to add the user to the required group.

Ldap <> timesheet discrepancies

Exceptions will arise if the project time logs don't match the project, that is if:

1. Time logged to a non existing project
2. time logged to non-existing tasks

In the first case you will not be able to get a report. (You will get a generic error message saying something went wrong at the OpsProject side, you will need to access the logs of the OpsProject server to find what went wrong exactly.) In the second case the entries not matching a known task will be highlighted.

Note that discrepancies between the stored projects and the timesheets can not arise through normal or faulty use of OPS. Only if the stored projects were restored from a backup older than the timesheet ics files or if either the ics files or the ldap back-end was edited in some way outside OPS can there be a mismatch.

Solution: You will have to manually synchronize your timesheets with your ldap back-end, either by editing the timesheet ics files or the ldap, depending on which best describes the current sitation.

-- IvanaCace - 29 Dec 2008