Tracker Integration

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'Real' Project Management is more than just Planning and Resource management, which require the features discussed in the previous pages; it also involves the management of a wide range of documents, budgets, meetings, actions, risks, issues etc., etc.

This wider need tends to have a style and 'flavour' that is dependent on both the project and indeed the project manager, and this is where a Tiki based Project Management approach will have the unique capability of being able to integrate other standard features e.g. Trackers, Wiki pages/Structures, Calendars, Spreadsheets etc. This mix of features can be utilised in a very flexible customised way to suit the specific needs of the project.

Of particular use are Trackers and, as has been discussed for other Features, it is proposed that a Tracker be 'associated' with Projects so that the flexibility of Trackers can be used to allow any number of additional parameters and functions to be used with individual Projects. This approach is very similar to the use of a Registration Tracker where a specific Tracker is 'associated' with the User Feature so that addition user parameters/profile information can be captured in a very flexible way.

As illustrated above, the first part of the proposed approach is to be able to have a Master Project Tracker for all the Projects on a site-wide basis. This would be used in any way the site admin would like, to add a range of parameters to the basic project functionality.

To configure the 'association', it is suggested that the Project Feature admin screen is used to define a Tracker Id# and a number of fields within the Tracker which would be populated (and updated) with designated project information. There should always be at least one Field which is used to hold the project Id#. The Tracker with the defined Fields must have been previously created and checks should be made that not only do the Tracker and the Field(s) already exist but the Field formats should be appropriate for the linked data.

Logically only the one Field Id# need ever be defined - which would capture the project Id# in a simple Numeric format - from which any other stored Project information could be referenced and retrieved. It is thought however that it may be convenient to link other data (say) the Project Title and/or Project Description, even though this would duplicate data, since it would be convenient to have visually meaningful field information when viewing an individual Tracker item/record.

If the project settings have this 'association' established then whenever a new project is created a new Tracker record/item is automatically created with the appropriate Field(s) populated with the linked Project data - and this Tracker data would also be updated whenever the Project data is edited/changed.

As a second level of Tracker integration, in addition to a Master Project Tracker being associated, it is also proposed that individual Task Trackers could be established and 'associated' on a per Project basis as illustrated below:

For this Task Tracker case, the 'association' would be established and managed in the Project creation/edit screen and the one mandatory field that is 'associated' should be a numeric field that has the task Id# stored in it. Again additional fields could be 'linked' for convenience.

For this Task Tracker a new record would be created in the appropriate Task Tracker whenever a new Task is created in the Project and the tracker field(s) populated/updated in a similar way to the 'Master' tracker.

It should be noted that this overall approach could be adopted to associate Trackers with other Tiki Features, e.g. Master Calender Tracker + individual Calendar Event Trackers.

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