TenForce

Press Release: ScrumForce supports the Scrum Development Methodology

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:34:18 GMT

ScrumForce is a collaboration solution. It gives teams and their customers immediate and transparent visibility. It’s hierarchical structure links sprints and stories. It tracks work, assignments and consolidation in one, comprehensive overview.

“We have learned that solutions and configurations we have build on ad-hoc requests of our customers, could easily be re-engineered to be of value for other customers”, says Bastiaan Deblieck, TenForce Account Manager.

The typical scrum whiteboard is present in TenForce as color coded stories that can be dragged & dropped as work is progressing.

Functions and features:

Supports Stories and Sprints
Manage resource calendar and availability
Organize Retrospective & Planning meetings
Track Product Backlog
Automatic Velocity calculation

More information can be found in our ScrumForce Flyer.

The inside story of the Help function, or the ugly side of configurability.

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:36:45 GMT

TenForce has been built from the ground up with ‘powerful configuration options’ in mind. This enables us to deploy one (1!) standard version across a wide variety of industries like publishing, banking, discrete and process manufacturing and services. Yet, this also has its drawbacks as was recently painfully illustrated by the development of our online help system.

As an engineering team, we have made the often difficult decisions to create a solution that has powerful configuration options. Some clear examples are:

workspaces and lists are created on the fly,
fields on detail pages can be switched on or off and repositioned at will,
new fields of any type can be added to any list,
extra tabs can be created to mimic paper forms,
workflow steps are created on the fly along with its authorizations.

One of consequences of this approach is that when customer A is looking at the TenForce installation of Customer B, he or she often does not recognize that this is in fact the same application.

Recently we have delivered an integrated online help system. Early tests at our customers quickly learned us that most of the standard help is in fact useless in specific customer situations. Customers typically want to have help texts that are specific for the business processes they have modeled in TenForce.

So we came up with a two step approach:

If on a given location, a customer specific help is available, that help is shown. Typically we develop training material only once and generate from the training material the necessary PDF files to be handed out, and the online help files.
If no such specific help is available, we revert back to the standard help.

Pick your columns

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:39:09 GMT

Probably one of the most used features in TenForce is the Smart List. A Smart Lists shows a selection of tasks, actions, issues, risks,… We created more customization options for the end user using an easy-to-use ‘column picker’

The button to trigger this picker is on the same location as before.

You can modify the sequence by selecting a column name in the ‘Selected columns’ list and move it as you want it.

On Meetings, Meeting Topics and Meeting Minutes

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:14:40 GMT

Meetings seem to be a necessary evil. Up to know we supported meetings in TenForce essentially to capture the agreed work and to make sure nothing was forgotten. We now take this to the next level by bringing more features to the individual meeting topics. Meeting topics can now contain their own meeting minutes and their agreed list of actions.

The diagram below shows a set of sample meeting topics that are put on the agenda. Each of these topics can now have their separate meeting minutes text. Also actions agreed in the context of a specific meeting topic can be linked to that topic.

Note that meeting organizers that want to continue to work in the old way can still do so.

Supported features

The TenForce outlook add-in allows you to directly link a mail to a specific meeting and a specific topic. This is a feature many of our users use to pre-fill the list of topics to discuss based on mails that are received. As already supported before, the subject and text of the attached mails is saved as title and description in TenForce. Also linked documents are saved as attachments.

This represents a huge time saver in the meeting preparation.

Work that script!

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:06:30 GMT

Custom Item Scripts are one of major new features we are very excited about. Any logic that can be expressed as a set of rules can now be integrated in TenForce as part of the life cycle of tasks and actions. Common uses include custom validations, calculating dependent fields, integrating to other systems like SAP and alike.

To model this exciting new feature, we looked at where people typically wanted extra logic to be inserted. The following list turned out to be the required interaction points:

before/after validation
before/after insert/update/delete
before/after status changes
before/after time registration

On each of these locations, TenForce admins can now insert custom logic. The following list shows some examples of what our users have done

when creating a new project, look in SAP for the Sales Order details and copy some of the fields into TenForce custom fields,
before saving an item validate if all fields are provided, this validation depends on the item status (e.g. to set an item to resolved, check if the solution and root cause fields are filled in),
when closing a complaint item in TenForce, assemble all information and attachments and post it to the document management system under the relevant customer reference.

What do you need to get started?

First and foremost, the requirements. Are the custom rules to be implemented clear? Is the data required from external systems available?

The actual script is written in the popular .Net C# language. TenForce publishes a clear API (application programming interface) that allows to interact with the TenForce objects without the need to access the database directly.

In the future, we will deliver a Microsoft Visual Studio add-in that allows the user to

quickly get an overview of the defined scripts on my TenForce installation,
write or adapt a C# script, using IntelliSense to quickly browse the available API calls and their parameters,
step by step debugging,
deployment on the acceptance or live system from within the Visual Studio environment.

New Work Templates feature

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:31:31 GMT

TenForce now supports to model a set of related activities as a Template. This Template is created with as much detail as possible. The user can instantiate a template at any moment. This results in the necessary actions and tasks according to what is modeled in the template.

Common uses of templates are:

all activities related to the creation of a new project,
to do items to introduce a new member in the team,
checklist activities to close a project,
etc.

Some of our customers are using the TenForce Template feature to model all activities for specific customer requests or to make sure that all actions related to promotional campaigns are put in the relevant people’s to-do list.

The advantages reported by our users are:

knowledge about specific processes are captured in the system and not only in the heads of people,
quick and easy task creation with all relevant data already filled in,
only the specific attributes like actual due date, actual people responsible,… are requested.

New Scheduling feature in TenForce

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:14:32 GMT

TenForce now has an optional Scheduling feature. Tasks can have predecessor and successor tasks. The algorithm used in the TenForce application is a CPM (critical path method) calculation engine.

Very often things turn out not the way we anticipate: things run late, people get sick, work takes longer than foreseen. Up to now, project and team leaders needed to manually shift tasks later in time to adjust for this delay.

Administrators can now turn on the scheduling tab on the task and action detail pages, so that pre- and successor tasks can be modeled.

As shown by the screen capture below, a lot of the typical planning fields become available:

earliest start
latest start
earliest finish
latest finish

MS Project versus TenForce Scheduling

Many of our users have asked us to position MSProject versus this new TenForce scheduling feature. The distinction to be made is as follows:

Use MSProject if you need a real planning process of several (>50) tasks.
Use MSProject if you need resource leveling
Use TenForce Scheduling when the number of tasks does not justify the overhead of creating a plan.
Use TenForce Scheduling to quickly model dependencies between tasks.

Advanced features

TenForce takes into account many of the day to day constraints that team and project leaders face:

tasks that are finished prematurely, can trigger early start of subsequent tasks,
non privileged users cannot start on tasks if not all predecessor tasks are completed,
tasks that are no longer needed can be canceled and will not take calendar days, but their connection to dependent tasks will be kept.

Semanticians (*) at Information Online 2008 in London

Bastiaan Deblieck — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:51:13 GMT

I was at a most interesting show in London last week: Information Online. This show brings publishers and technology vendors together in the wonderful Olympia Grand Hall.

As you know from previous posts TenForce believes that Semantic Technology will make machines smarter. We believe that this technology will mature in the area of publishing and then spread to other industries to help them to manage the wide variety and ever increasing amount of unstructured data. It is our ambition to, one day, integrate this technology in our project management solution.

One key component in interpreting and organizing this unstructured data is a taxonomy/ontology. Taxonomies/ontologies represent a view on the world that can be used to support thesauruses, indexing, search, categorizing, text mining, … I was at the Mondeca booth to sell, together with them, their taxonomy/ontology management solution.


Jean Delahousse, Mondeca – “Très sympa” – CEO	my self


The European Commission was also represented through its different institutions. Among them was the Office for Official Publications, our customer.	Also present was Wolters Kluwer, who we help in Belgium and in Europe.

On the technology side we saw a lot of companies selling enterprise search and enterprise content management. Those who looked a bit further saw really interesting search and text mining solutions that will reshape the way we manage information in the future.
The show was a big success for us and for other organizations represented on the floor of the Grand Hall.

(*) According to Wikipedia a semantician is somebody who studies the science of meaning in words. I would like to hijack the word and use it for “semantic technician”.

TenForce Pragmatic Semantic Technology

Bastiaan Deblieck — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:17:00 GMT

Information doubles, triples, quadruples, …

How to build foundations for knowledge?

Today organizations of different types and sizes managing information are confronted with a vast amount of data that requires industrial strength solutions. The raw materials are in different places, in different languages, with different availability and different reliability.

Solutions

TenForce has proven track record in delivering semantic technology solutions. We help you to:

Build multipurpose content that can be sold or presented in different formats in a seamless way.
Increase added value of publications through better referencing, indexes and search results …
Increase the quality of publications through a streamlined and standardized indexation process.
Reduce lead times of publication creation by automating labor intensive tasks like thesaurus management and index creation.
Leverage existing IT investments by integrating the expertise and knowledge in existing applications.

Expertise

Programming	NET, JAVA, Perl, Lisp, ECMA script, javascript, Vbscript
Formats	HTML, CSS, SGML, XML, DTD, DSSL, XML Schema, XSLT, Xquery
Knowledge	Topic Maps, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SKOS
Standards	Dublin Core, British Standard 8723, SNOMED
Tools	CMS, Drupal, Sigmalink, Omnimark, Coldfusion, Mondeca, Oracle Text
Set up	Document Data Migrations & Complex Format Conversions

Reliable partner

TenForce is the ideal partner for advanced, challenging projects in the area of semantic technology.

Advanced knowledge of semantic technology.
Dedicated business unit and references in the area of semantic technology.
Thorough understanding of business processes in your organization.
Strong project management skills and common sense that guarantee results in this innovative and evolving domain.

Strategic advice

TenForce organizes conferences on a regular basis. In addition TenForce tunes its advice to the customer needs. Where are the strategic benefits of semantic technology? What can it bring to my operations? What is the impact on my organization, on my processes, on my customers and suppliers?

This can range from a couple of hours to a full blown study to design, for instance, an RDF-database or to define a plan that inserts semantic technology in the existing systems.

Training

A semantic technology project (Initiation, traps and pitfalls, planning, technology choices, …)
The semantic standards (RDF, RDFA, XHTML M12N, OWL, SKOS, XTM, Microformats, DCMI… their status and application)
Applied XSLT
Applied RDF, OWL and SKOS.

Specifications, design, development & implementation

TenForce has years of experience in the area of software development. We have done numerous successful projects in different industries. Our solutions support mission critical activities in publishing, banking, insurance, telecom, manufacturing and government. TenForce endorses semantic technology as a means to make information readily available; in an efficient way, part of the business process.

Our Technology Partner

TenForce acts as an integrator to Mondeca ITM. Intelligent Topic Manager is a terminology, thesaurus, taxonomy and ontology management system.

Some references

	Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Design, development and implementation of a Thesaurus Management System for EUROVOC. Based on Mondeca ITM technology to manage concepts and terms it delivers thesaurus information over the internet via the content management system.
	Wolters Kluwer LTRE. Content Management System for the publishing process in a European context. After a successful proof of concept TenForce built a multi language publishing solution based on semantic technology (OWL, RDF). The TenForce team (4 to 7 engineers) is responsible for the definition, design, development and implementation.
	Wolters Kluwer Belgium. Thesaurus Management System. Requirements, specifications, design, architecture, development, test, maintenance and change management. This brings faster searches through the available text material and standardized high quality indexing across different content domains.
	Wolters Kluwer Belgium. Table of Contents Management System supports the process of building publications from individual texts and is as such core to the publishing flow. It keeps track of text versions and history. It can generate output for different media (book, CD, web, …). As a result there is a reduced cycle time for publication creation, traceability for individual texts, reuse of existing text material.

TenForce is currently delivering services to:

Press Release: TenForce and Mondeca Chosen to Develop Next Generation European Union Thesaurus Management System

Bastiaan Deblieck — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:25:16 GMT

November 30, 2008 – TenForce BVBA and Mondeca SA announced today that they have been selected by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities to provide the new management system for the Eurovoc multilingual thesaurus. The new system will be implemented by TenForce and will leverage Mondeca’s Intelligent Topic Manager semantic software platform (ITM).

The Office for Official Publications of the European Communities is the official publisher of the institutions, agencies and other bodies of the European Union. The Publications Office manages the multilingual Eurovoc thesaurus. Available in 21 official and 1 candidate country language, it is used for document indexation by the European Parliament, the Publications Office, European national and regional parliaments, several national government departments and other European Institutions, agencies and bodies.

The new system will contain a web based thesaurus publication system developed by TenForce, and will use Mondeca’s ITM Terminology, Thesaurus, Taxonomy, Ontology management solution as its thesaurus edition component.

The thesaurus management system will allow The Office for Official Publications of the European Communities to meet the challenge posed by the increasing amount of Eurovoc languages, terms, editors, and users.
“We are delighted to be chosen to deliver the next generation Eurovoc thesaurus management system,” says Bastiaan Deblieck, TenForce Sales & Marketing Manager.” This is a tremendous validation of our semantic based approach to thesaurus management”.

Jean Delahousse, CEO of Mondeca said “Winning the Eurovoc project confirms Mondeca’s position as a leading supplier of multi-lingual semantic based thesaurus and taxonomy management solutions.”

Mondeca

Mondeca is editor of the Intelligent Topic Manager (ITM) ontology management tool. ITM optimizes rich content organization and access by providing sophisticated support for management of reference metadata, terminologies, taxonomies, domain specific master data and knowledge bases. ITM leverages these reference elements for content indexation and to deliver navigation tools for web based content including taxonomies, indexes, and knowledge base navigation aids. ITM conforms to several semantic technology and structured vocabulary standards including URI, RDF, OWL, SKOS, BS8723 and ISO 25964.

Mondeca’s tools are being used in Europe, the US and Canada for applications including domain specific intranets, document archive management, e-commerce web portal solutions, medical terminology management and legal publishing frameworks for clients including AFP, LexisNexis France, Wolters Kluwer Belgium, French government, PSA Peugeot-Citroen, French Ministry of Defense, Thomson Reuters, French National Railway Company (SNCF).

http://www.mondeca.com
Contact: Jean Delahousse, jean.delahousse@mondeca.com,
+33 1 44 92 35 06

TenForce

TenForce is a Belgian software company that has been active in the domain of semantic technology for more than 10 years. It has a proven track record in thesaurus management, multi language content management, pre press, publication production. It offers software services (analysis, design, develop, test, project management) and is also the maker of a pragmatic project management product. Customers include, among others, : Wolters Kluwer Belgium, Wolters Kluwer LTRE, Belgacom, Telenet, Roularta, De Persgroep.

http://www.tenforce.be
Contact: Bastiaan Deblieck, bastiaan.deblieck@tenforce.be,
+32 16 31 48 60

Job Application: Energieke Recruiter

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:44:02 GMT

Wij zijn op zoek naar een energieke recruiter. Van een recruiter (m/v) verwacht TenForce dat hij of zij:

Job descriptions kan opstellen.
Kandidaten kan zoeken via CV-databases of andere kanalen.
Interviews kan voorbereiden en afspraken maken.
Het aanwervingsproces kan begeleiden.

Op termijn kan deze persoon doorgroeien naar een verantwoordelijke HR functie.

Liefst 3-talen spreken (NL, FR, ENG) en zeker NL & ENG schrijven.

Ervaring: 1 à 3 jaar.

Wat hebben wij te bieden:

Vast contract.
Marktconform loon en extra legale voordelen.
De kans om mee te bouwen aan een groeiend, financiëel gezond, high tech bedrijf met een groeiend aantal medewerkers, producten en diensten.
30 gedreven collega‘s.

The Project Management Prayer

Bastiaan Deblieck — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:17:08 GMT

I’m working with a team of project managers and I’m trying to coach them in their day to day project management activities. I explained them about Prince2, PMBOK, Scrum, Waterfall, Quality Management, … Below is an attempt to give them some fundamental guidelines on how to behave, what the nature is of their work, what the basic modus operandi can be. In short, stuff that is hard to find in books.

I’m a project manager in a matrix organization.
I manage the world around me based on a model of an ideal solution.
a.The world around me is represented through stakeholders.
b.The main parts of the model are:
i. A specification.
ii.A plan with tasks, milestones, deliverables, durations, work and resources.
c. If I do not have a decent specification I am directionless and I will lose a lot of time, quality, and accuracy in my “solution”.
d.If I do not have a plan or if my plan does not represent “a” reality I will not be able say anything about the future of the project and I will not be able focus resources, time or energy to a specific point in time for a specific realization.
The tools to manage the world around me are defined in project management methodologies. They are my hammer, screwdriver, saw … Nothing more, nothing less. They do not guarantee good results. I know when and how to use them. They include things like:
a. Risk management
b.Issue management
c.Status reporting
d.Quality management
e.Communication management
f.…
The lens through which I measure the world has several facets:
a.Scope
b.Planning
c.Time
d.Resources
e.Quality
f.Risks
g.Budget
I’m obsessed by things I can see, put my hands on, count, wrap up, give to somebody else in the chain or give to a customer: tangibles.
I’m obsessed by risk mitigation.
a.The further in the future the more insecure, so I divide up the work in such a way that the chance to predict/manage the future increases.
b.After a period of work (action, tasks, phase, stage, …) I expect a validation.
c.I log things that can damage my success as risk or issues. This helps me to focus on the right problem first; to communicate about the problem and increase awareness.
I’m obsessed by quality.
a.The sequence of: expectation executionvalidation adjustment is my guarantee for quality.
b.I manage this sequence in a chain of events between the different players in my project. Everybody is somebody’s customer, everybody’s somebody’s supplier.
I know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. When something needs to be done I look for:
a.Smallest iteration in a series of spiral activities to solve a problem that brings value.
b.Next Incremental iteration bringing value.
I help technical people. Technical people tend to lose themselves in technology. I respect that because without them I would not have this nice technical stuff to work on. I, on the other hand, help them to deliver real things that people want to pay for. This requires focused activity.
Most of the time I’m the only one that sees the end to end process, the chain of activities that lead to tangible, value adding results.
I operate remotely;from a distance. I only intervene if I have no other option. This means that I will do everything I can to make sure that the parts in the chain operate together, from my desktop. I only stand up and walk to somebody’s desk if there is really nothing else I can do. And even then I try to make my intervention a generic one so that I build a basis for continuous improvement. Most of the time this will be: a checklist, a form, a process step, a communication, a sign off, a check in/a check out, …
Acting as a project manager will not make you the most beloved person in the company. Do not expect loud cheering. This will be compensated by the good feeling that you made the organization deliver results.

Idea Management: the Swiss army knife approach

Bastiaan Deblieck — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:17:56 GMT

Imagine my surprise when I found out that there are tools designed and developed to do idea management! Idea Management? The goal of tools like this is to process ideas for innovation, for improvement, for change, … in a structured way. Isn’t it a pity that you are supposed to do this in a isolated software application?

Typically these tools support the following process.

Everybody can enter ideas.
Ideas are compared, evaluated, discussed and eventually approved for realization.
Ideas are realized through actions, work groups, projects.
Management measures the amount of new ideas, the amount of realized ideas, the benefits, status of the actions, …

It’s a pity you are supposed to do this in a isolated software application. Not with TenForce. A very powerful and generic concept underlies the TenForce application. This simple concept allows to manage all kinds of work and to relate one work concept to another. For example: it can manage risks and their mitigating actions, audits and their findings, ideas and their activities for implementation…

Next to managing the idea process the TenForce application is able capture all idea related information (estimated costs, estimated benefits, impact on other processes or machines, approvers, evaluators,…). At the same time it is also able to dispatch and follow up the ideas and their related activities to everybody involved. This means that you can see what ideas/activities have been assigned to you. And it is self evident that all this information can be visualized through dashboards and indicators.

Now stay tuned to this blog and find out how TenForce can help you to manage other parts of your work environment in one and the same application:

The Swiss army knife approach to project management
The Swiss army knife approach to incident management
The Swiss army knife approach to claim handling
The Swiss army knife approach to risk management
The Swiss army knife approach to audits
The Swiss army knife approach to meetings
The Swiss army knife approach to …

Eat your own dog food, 16 441 times

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:22:15 GMT

This famous quote applies certainly to our own company. We are making and selling a project/process management solution. So it is only natural to use it ourselves to manage our internal engineering, support and sales processes.

What’s in our personal TenForce:

All our backlog items
Full release (sprint) content
To do lists for all engineering and support people
Invoices are based on TenForce time sheets

This installation is called ‘Tracker’. People say: ‘if it’s not in tracker, it doesn’t exist’. These are the typical agreements that we watch out for when doing implementations at customers. As soon as the team starts to make agreements on what and how to put it in their ‘TenForce’, we know we have crossed the critical mass boundary. Our boundary certainly has been passed already a long time. I just checked our ‘tracker’ and found that we have 16 441 work items in there.

We also have a number of customer specific online versions of TenForce where mixed TenForce/customer project teams use the software for change management, issues, bug tracking. All project meetings are managed by the tool.

Some of the guys in the office are even using it to manage their house construction projects…

Our team leaders arrange, distribute and track work without a need for much interaction. Work linked to plans, meetings, customer requests and so on is passed on to team member’s to do lists. I personally do a lot of this work allocation and follow-up in the evening. A rough estimate is that we need about 3 or 4 hours in total every two weeks to setup and manage the detailed work of 9 people. Most of the items created to manage this work are tasks that take anything from 1 to 4 hours.

The top 1 reason to use MSProject

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:53:13 GMT

Many of our customers are integrating MSProject plans with TenForce. Up to now, you needed to import the xml version of your plan. TenForce then allowed you to link the day to day work to your MSProject tasks. When the plan changes, you can re-import the plan and it will nicely update the tasks in TenForce (e.g. name or date change, extra tasks,…)

Our new Ukrainian colleague Dmitry has been working hard the last few weeks to develop an Add-In for MSProject . It allows you to, without leaving the MSP tool, upload work to TenForce and download actual progress.

Follow these steps:

Download and install the MSP add-in from within the application. This creates a new menu in your MSProject that allows you connect to your TenForce installation.
Select the set of tasks you like to upload (or update) to TenForce.
When the task details are updated in TenForce, these changes can be synchronized back to MSProject.
If you have imported tasks from MSProject to TenForce, MSProject remembered in what project you have uploaded the tasks. So when you have done changes in your plan, you do not need to select again to what project in TenForce you like to synchronize. Just click the upload button in the menu, and changes are uploaded.

So this is at least one good reason to use MSProject: It’s integration with TenForce allows you to plan the work, distribute it to your team, and automate the consolidation back to your plan.

You may remember from previous posts in this blog we really do like MSProject. Because

it works,
it does what it is supposed to do, namely plan.

If you want to become a planning hero, here is what we have learned:

don’t try to put too much detail in the plan (limit yourself to max 150-200 tasks)
structure your plan
use deliverables rather than activities in your task names
think about milestones, critical path
then link the plan to TenForce to distribute and follow-up the work done by the team.

Let us know what you think about this new feature.

Press Release: EVAL Europe explains how to run a plant

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:29:27 GMT

One of the components in this huge machinery is TenForce.
This article mentions that TenForce allows to centralize all activities, that it offers full traceability and that it is incredibly easy to report status on all audit related activities.

About EVAL

EVAL Europe is the leading provider of superior gas barriers. This guarantees an extended shelf life for food and cosmetic products. The high resistance to hydrocarbons, oils and organic solvents makes EVAL suitable for fuel tanks and chemical packaging. EVAL Europe is located in Antwerp , Belgium . It is a part of Kuraray Co, Japan , employing about 7000 people worldwide.

Source: TenForce BVBA

Be smart, be very smart…

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:59:19 GMT

You had lists, now you can create your own ‘smart’ lists. Find out more about the feature we’ve been working on very hard these last few weeks.

Smart lists are best explained when we take a look at their setup. You should be able to ‘read the settings page’ and understand what kind of result they return.

In the example below, we are selecting all items in a selection of workspaces and lists, that are ‘ongoing’ and are ‘within a certain due date range’. The result appears, just like the other lists, as tabs on the page.

How smart are these Smart lists?

Smart lists have following nifty features:

You can freely create new ones, edit existing smart lists, remove them and copy them to a new smart list to tweak extra conditions.
In the case shown above, we are logged in as an administrator of the workspace. Then you can share the smart list with a selection of users, everybody, or just keep the smart list for your personal use. Note that only workspace administrators can do this.
If you’re not happy with your current result, edit one or more of the conditions, and run the smart list again.
The result can be treated like a normal list: that means you can sort it, edit the result, make a nice print-out view or dump the contents to an excel file. Also bulk updates are possible on smart lists.

Let us know what you think of this feature when you experiment with it.

An avalanche of new features

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:31:20 GMT

In the last few weeks, we have delivered truckloads of new features. It would take too many posts to describe them all in detail, but have a look at the list below. If you like more information, send a mail to support@tenforce.com to get the detailed release notes.

What did we add:

Better usability
- New visual layout, less colors, less clutter, clearer interface
- Pick/remove columns on overview screens
- New picklists input fields, especially useful if you have 100+ users
New functions
- Unicode support
- Excel export
- Advanced query page
Work on items
- Smart lists to save your own favorite searches
- Move items to other lists, copy items
- Bulk updates to update any field ‘en mass’
New project extensions
- Ability to add project work packages (aka sub-projects)
- An easy to use MSProject add-in to synchronize your MSProject file.

Two features we’d like to explain more detail are the smart lists and the MSProject integration. More about them in later posts.

Time to fill in the time…

Frans Vanhaelewijck — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:57:37 GMT

People often ask why TenForce is offering time sheets as one of its optional modules. ‘There are so many time sheet systems, why did you develop your own?’ There is a very specific reason…

Our user’s work is brought together in their todo list. “My To Do’s” is one of the most used tabs on TenForce. Every item on that list is there because it was raised in a meeting, a project plan, some issue resolution, some process step… Behind the scene, TenForce keeps track of the item’s origin. It examines at each workflow step, and upon item completion, whether the definition of the project, process or workspace has time sheets enabled or not. So it is very easy to notify users that time registration is required on items 1, 2 and 5, but is not required on items 3 and 4 that they close during the day.

That means that TenForce time sheets can achieve an amazing amount of detail. (if it’s that what you want) As work is evolving, time sheet entry is triggered during the work week. Who can remember on the Friday what he/she did during the week? It’s not uncommon to see TenForce users that have time sheets of 30 lines or more, yet these people did little or no effort other than entering their hours when completing their work.

Why all that detail?

Time sheet registrations are the basis for another optional TenForce module: “Invoice preparation”. TenForce does not actually generate invoices, but can feed all detailed registrations to accounting systems, including manhour rates. These rates can vary between a very generic rate, and a cost split rate between different departments, each with their special rate that depends on the project, type of work and who performed the work.

Separate time sheet entries

Of course, on many workspaces, less detailed time registrations are required. Below a common list of activities is available for the user to enter time:

Ad hoc time registration on item level

Using toolbar buttons, time can be logged on items.

The popup screen above, allows you to also register the total time required to complete the task (ETC or Estimate to complete)

How much more time do you need…

That dreaded question is now not only on the lips of your favorite manager/customer, but also TenForce prompts you to enter the so-called ‘Estimate to Complete’ or ‘ETC’ for short. This means that any action or task can have a ‘planned’, ‘actual’ and ‘ETC’ effort.