But, what would a real drama look like on Facebook?

Check out Hamelt (Facebook News Feed Edition) from Sarah Schmelling.  If you’re nerdy enough to appreciate Shakespeare and Social Media humor, then this is a real gem.  I personally like the lines: “Hamlet becomes a fan of daggers.” and “Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float.”

Glad I never installed that Zombie Army application!

Product Information

Harvest is a subscription-based time tracking application with clients for many platforms including desktop, web, and mobile.  After logging in to the web application, a dashboard view gives users a nice, high-level view of the current time logs, which might encourage people to log time more frequently if they knew that their boss was so easily checking in on progress.  The navigation seems freakishly intuitive and adaptable - it auto saves for me and remembers my preferences.  Bummer… doesn’t look like there are any resource allocation tools.

Website: http://www.getharvest.com/
Pricing for 10 users:  $90/month = $1080/year

Meeting Our Goals

Using our initial goal list as a reference, Harvest looks like it is a contender.

Harvest allows users easily to:

Bill for time: When setting up a project, it is possible to bill by an employee’s standard rate or a rate per task.  The invoice creation tool is super flexible, and there is integration for QuickBooks built in as well.  I also like that you can create a free-form invoice for clients easily that is not tied to hours worked.

Estimate time: You can estimate against total hours per project or task hours.  Nice feature as we run projects that are Agile, fixed-bid, and everywhere in between.  Reports make it easy to see how we’re performing against estimates, but no weekly burn-down graphs.

Run reports: The reports are very intuitive and pretty, if not wholly flexible and comprehensive.  For example, it seems difficult to run a report for a project that you’re not currently working on if you don’t know any of the project dates.  I would prefer that in addition to the current report interface that there was a dropdown containing all projects (perhaps letting you toggle between current projects and all projects) that would drive you to the overview screen for that project.  It is very easy, however, to drill down on information contained in the reports to glean a lot of information quickly.

Integrate with some other project management application: StandardTime integrates with Basecamp at a high level, in that you can import project names and employees assigned to projects and auto generate accounts for newbies if needed. It doesn’t integrate any of Basecamp’s To-Do lists, milestones, or time tracking data.  It would also be awesome if imported projects had links to the Basecamp URL for users to quickly jump between the two applications.

Write notes about what was done: You can write specific notes for each time entry, and, in the daily time log entry view (even with stop watch), this is a seamless step in the workflow, and very similar to TimeFox.  It requires some drilling to see these in the report view, but they come out in the XLS export nicely.  You can also write notes at a project level.

I sure wish we could:

See how much time was spent doing X or X-type tasks: Tasks are independent of one another and not able to be grouped in folders or designated as part of a category of tasks.  So, if you want to know how much time you spent doing project management related tasks at the end of the year, you’d need to run reports for all projects and make this tabulation manually.

Use it for resource allocation: There isn’t a way to allocate time against resources for the future.  The overall project estimation paradigm that Harvest has is great and would be awesome if this applied by week and project to individual resources.

Running Reports

Harvest is intuitive, but could be lacking for those really curious people who like to customize reports.  For people who want to gain insight into an individual project and are not as interested in cross-project data (for example, how much time total is spent in meetings during a month), Harvest is a real winner with its simple interface and graphical reports.

With the exception of group and subsystem reports, I can generate all of the other reports in my wish list easily, so am pretty happy.  I guess a bit of math could keep my acumen sharp.

Entering Time

This is where Harvest really shines.  There are so many ways to enter time using Harvest that one of them is bound to fit into your workflow.  Additionally, there is an API for Harvest so you can spend the time to create new widgets.

With Harvest you can log time:

• Using a desktop widget - Mac and PC.
• Using a timer.
• Using a form - daily or weekly timesheet.
• From Twitter.
• While outside the network with the database server.
• From a mobile device.
  • From the iPhone
  • Via Text Message

With Harvest you cannot log time:

• While offline.

Integration with Other Tools

Harvest integrates with several other tools already, and can be extended to integrate with others using their API.

Harvest integrates with:

• Project milestone application - Basecamp
• Issue and defect tracking - Zendesk
• Billing - QuickBooks
• Reporting - Does itself
• Project documentation - Basecamp and Does itself

StandardTime does not integrate with:

• SVN
• Resource allocation

Other Considerations?

Use our servers for database hosting or allow for easy export of all time tracking information. Can export reports to XLS easily and can use API to create custom reports if needed.  But, since it’s hosted and no off-line option, if the Harvest servers go down, there is no time tracking.  But, good news that their servers are monitored 24/7.

Allow for new projects to be created easily using template for tasks. Super easy.  At first, I thought that the task rate was assigned in the template and couldn’t be altered per project.  Once I found out that wasn’t the case, I am in love.

Allow for import of past project time tracking data. Nope.  Thumbs down.

Allow for unlimited number of users. Hooray!  With the $90/month option, we can start with the ten that we need and add more with out cost.  Harvest even differentiates between contractors and FTEs in the dashboard reports.

Reasonable cost (per month or one-time). At $90 a month, it’s less than an hour of client work.

Support from company. Harvest has been around for two years and has an impressive list of endorsements.  I called them (no toll free number) and got a real person, right away.  All of this is a good indication of support levels in my book.

Cannot associate tasks to folders/subsystems.  This can be worked around by naming conventions; however, there would be no automatic totaling for project categories.  This is often something that requested by clients and would require hand calculation.

Security for and backup of logged data.  The $90/month plan comes with 128-bit SSL security and data is backed up daily.

Pricing guarantee. There is none offered on the site, and I haven’t called to inquire about this.  Having a price guarantee would be nice because once they have us a customer, we’ll be more locked in to paying whatever rate increases they have just to keep the service.

Got API? Yep!  The Harvest API is based on REST services. You can write data to and read data from the Harvest data store.

Product Information

Standard Time uses a database that is installed on an agency’s own servers (although a hosted option is available). Users have several options for entering time using the desktop client including form-based and stopwatch methods. The reports are very configurable, if not always pretty, using a Crystal Report like interface that can be extended by the agency (or by StandardTime for a fee). Because the database is housed on the agency’s servers, it is possible to extend StandardTime functionality easily, which is something that RealEyes Media has done by building an enhanced graphical reporting application. A big drawback of the desktop application is that it must be used in the same network as the database server and no offline time entry is supported.

Website: http://www.stdtime.com/
Pricing for 10 users: $1,335.00 one time fee

Meeting Our Goals

Using our initial goal list as a reference, StandardTime does a good job of meeting our overall time tracking objectives.

StandardTime allows users easily to :

Bill for time: Separate billing rates per client, project, employee, or task type are available, as is integration with QuickBooks.

Estimate time: Estimations can be done on a per-task basis. You can also log an estimated number of hours and cost in the project view, but StandardTime doesn’t track against these values.

Run reports: Reports allow us to customize the report criteria as well as the level of detail shown, so that aggregate time for a group of tasks (what StandardTime calls a subsystem) can easily be shown. The report can be exported as CSV/Excel which is nice as the report format is a bit too Plain Jane for us, and we haven’t spent the time learning the reporting interface to alter it much.

See how much time was spent doing X or X-type tasks: The ability to assign a task to grouping criteria such as a category (used across projects) and a subsystem (used within a single project) and run reports against these groups is very powerful when analyzing data.

With more effort we can:

Integrate with some other project management application: StandardTime integrates with MS Project out of the box, which is a tool that is overkill for us to use currently. With some additional effort, we can write extensions to the ST application to integrate with other tools that we use. However, we’ve been too busy working for clients to do this for ourselves.

Use it for resource allocation: You can schedule resources in advance for project work and run reports against future allocation. However, this isn’t done in a one screen easy-to-view way and you have to enter in other data, such as time estimations, that aren’t always practical for some project administrative tasks.

Write notes about what was done: You can write specific notes for each time entry, but this isn’t a seamless workflow step. There is also room for some overall project notes in the project view. We have had some spotty issues with logged notes not being actually recorded in the database.

Running Reports

In my opinion, the best thing about StandardTime is the flexibility that users have in running reports. If you take the time to set up your project at the beginning, you can glean gobs and gobs of data from it and answer nit-picky, low-level questions about how time was spent.

Entering Time

StandardTime has three primary vehicles for entering time: desktop application (Windows only), web application, and a mobile application. The mobile application is designed for the PalmOS and Windows Mobile platforms. Unfortunately, our one employee with Windows Mobile couldn’t get the application to work for him.

With StandardTime you can log time:

• Using a desktop widget.
• Using a timer.
• Using a form.
• From a mobile device? Potentially. Navigation of the web interface is difficult on the iPhone.

With StandardTime you cannot log time:

• While outside the network with the database server.
• While offline.

Integration with Other Tools

StandardTime integrates with some applications out of box, and can be extended to integrate with others with some programming and database knowhow.

StandardTime integrates with:

• Project milestone application - MS Project
• Issue and defect tracking - StandardIssue
• Billing - QuickBooks
• Reporting - Does itself
• Resource allocation - Does itself (and through MS Project), but not optimal for us.

StandardTime does not integrate with:

• SVN
• Project documentation

Other Considerations?

Found bugs/functionality issues:
Since we’ve used StandardTime for quite awhile now, we’ve also encountered some major functionality hiccups along the way that we didn’t notice during our demo period. As these will figure into our decision making process, I’ll list them here, but feel that this intimate knowledge of the application may unfairly weigh against it.

• Cannot use dropdown menus in secondary monitor
• Users must be connected to internal network to use desktop application (can use web tool though)
• No off-line time entry possibilities
• Application can randomly freeze, sometimes causing sustained loud system beep
• To see new tasks or projects sometimes users must re-open StandardTime.
• Occasionally, timer logs high number of negative hours.
• Occasionally, custom notes written by a user are not recorded in database.
• Time total in Project Task view does not always match that in a generated report. FYI, the total in the report is correct.

Use our servers for database hosting or allow for easy export of all time tracking information. Check, StandardTime uses our database for storing data.

Allow for new projects to be created easily using template for tasks. This can be done through duplicating a project, but watch out when duplicating a project and changing the client name at project level. The individual tasks will still be set up for the original client and your reports will be off.

Allow for import of past project time tracking data. Not out of box, but as we control the database, this could be possible, if not fun to implement.

Allow for unlimited number of users. Our license supports up to 10 users, and we’re almost running out of room. Each additional user is $149.00.

Reasonable cost (per month or one-time). Since we’ve used this solution for almost two years, it’s proven to be cheaper than a hosted, per-month subscription over time.

Support from company. Every person at StandardTime has been truly concerned with any problem that we have faced and any resolution they were able to provide was done very quickly, sometimes by the company’s owner. Additionally, it’s nice for RealEyes to support others in colorful Colorado.

We selected it after a lengthy evaluation process because it was an application that we could install on our own servers so that we could own our own data and extend the application however we liked to accomplish goals such as the ones above. I’ve written a pretty robust custom graphical reporting tool for it, in fact.

But, there are some significant issues with StandardTime that are starting to outweigh its benefits.

• Cannot use dropdown menus in secondary monitor
• Users must be connected to internal network to use desktop application (can use web tool though)
• No off-line time entry possibilities
• Application can randomly freeze, sometimes causing sustained loud system beep
• Complex set-up process for desktop application
• And more …

So, we’re currently evaluating alternate time tracking solutions to see if StandardTime is still the best choice for us. This has spurred quite a bit of thought about what we need in a time tracking application. In my opinion, if we’re going to go through the pains of adopting a new system, it should be one that really fits our needs.

What Are Our Time Tracking Goals?

On the surface, time tracking seems simple enough: record the time spent on a project. However, since each company has myriad uses and goals for this data, time tracking is rarely a simple operation.

Here’s a list of the things that RealEyes would like to do with time data once we have it.

• Bill for it
• Give clients/managers status reports
• Use it for future estimations
• Use it for resource allocation
• See how much time was spent doing X or X-type tasks
• See what percentage of time is billable
• See revenue brought in by particular projects/employees/clients/project types
• See time spent on particular projects/employees/clients/project types
• Write notes about what was done

What Reports Do We Need To Run?

Getting time information out of the time tracking application is a big deal. It’s the reason that we’re tracking time to begin with! It’s the parsing of this information that is important, to us, and to our clients.

These are common reports that we run:

• Hours by Project by Task by Custom Time Period
• Billable Amount by Project by Task by Custom Time Period
• Hours by Project by Task Group by Custom Time Period
• Billable Amount by Project by Task Group by Custom Time Period
• Total Hours by Resource by Custom Time Period
• Total Billable Amount by Resource by Custom Time Period
• Total Hours by Client by Custom Time Period
• Total Billable Amount by Client by Custom Time Period
• Total Hours by Custom Time Period
• Total Billable Amount by Custom Time Period
• Total Hours vs. Estimated Hours by Task
• Total Hours vs. Estimated Hours by Project

How Should Time Be Entered?

One of the biggest limitations of our current system is that when employees are outside of our network, they have to change how they’re entering time. Additionally, we need more mobile solutions and flexible ways that will fit into each employee’s work flow so that time tracking doesn’t become a headache.

Employees should be able to log time:

• Using a desktop widget. No accidental browser closings.
• Using a timer. For those who like to be precise.
• Using a form. For those who like to summarize their day/week.
• While outside the network. Because we travel quite a bit or work from home.
• From a mobile device. Primarily the iPhone, but from any web-enabled device would be most desirable
• While off line. Hey, the internet isn’t on my airplane (yet).

What Other Systems Should Integrate With Time Tracking?

Having people enter project information in lots of different tools multiple times is a huge resource drain, plus it just makes people grumpy. So, being able to integrate with other project information systems would be great. Here are a few that we use:

• Project milestone application (Trac)
• Issue and defect tracking (Trac/Bugzilla/Lighthouse)
• SVN (Trac/TortiseSVN)
• Project documentation (Trac/OneNote)
• Billing (QuickBooks)
• Reporting (Custom Tool/StandardTime)
• Resource allocation (Custom Tool)

So, really, we need to find a time tracking application that will integrate with Trac, or something to replace Trac with that integrates with the time tracking. QuickBooks seems to be a pretty standard integration requirement.

Other Considerations?

There are a few more things that my ideal time tracking solution would do… and here they are:

• Use our servers for database hosting or allow for easy export of all time tracking information.
• Allow for import of past project time tracking data.
• Allow for unlimited number of users
• Allow for unlimited number of open projects
• Allow for project templates - saved sets of tasks, etc.
• Allow for different billing rates per project, client, task, and/or resource
• Simple, elegant interface
• Reasonable cost (per month or one-time)
• If hosted service, security for and backup of logged data
• If hosted service, agreement for pricing for a set time period
• If hosted service, API to extend time tracking application or integrate with other applications
• If hosted service, company stability and longevity (and good references)

Next Steps

Now that I’ve organized my thoughts about what we need, it will be all the easier to evaluate time tracking solutions that will fit with RealEyes’ needs - every company will be different, of course. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing just that and posting my thoughts here. If you have any that you think I should consider, please comment.

Watch the Presentation via a Connect Recording, and view the the slides.

Amanda’s Take on The Betas

Dreamweaver: I’ve moved to the beta and don’t plan to look back to CS3. Everything seems stable, and features like the Code Navigator and Live View have already changed the way I work. I’m hooked. Something that I didn’t mention at the meeting that is also awesome in this latest version is that Dreamweaver no longer generates deprecated HTML. Along with Dreamweaver’s now superior CSS generation, JS extraction and code hinting, these features are sure to make my code squeaky clean. Or, at least clean enough to eat off of.

Fireworks: The beta isn’t quite as refined as the Dreamweaver one and I’ve caught more than a few hiccups while evaluating it. My favorite one being that if you export to HTML and CSS, it saves the HTML file with a GIF extension. Still, there is some real promise here. Most of all, I hope that the improvements to the vector tools are an indication of what is to come with Illustrator. Love new goodies in the Paths palette like sharpen and fillet corners. Also, the ability to export an AIR package or interactive PDF is awesome for prototyping. Sure to change our work flow in the future.

Acrobat.com: All this for free? Really? Hands-down the most awesome feature for me is Connect Now - a pretty robust version of Connect that allows you to host a meeting with three people (including yourself) for free. Screen sharing, remote control, chat, whiteboard, it’s all there. And free!! Also, I’m not a Buzzword convert yet, but think that it’s one slick program. Secret feature: generate as many PDFs from Buzzword as you’d like for free. Don’t just limit yourself to the five free ones in the main navigation.

Presentation Slides

For those of you who attended the meeting, you’ll notice that I only showed three of these. I thought I’d share the whole deck on 15 here.

So I made my own. You can download them.

What prompted this maelstrom of ColdFusion coding? The RSS generation files in FuseTalk Basic edition didn’t offer the breadth of options or depth of content that I wanted to give our members. Also, the original code didn’t produce a feed that the W3C Feed Validation Service considered to be valid. (Don’t believe me, see how the RSS from the Adobe Forums Validates.)

Improvement 1: Use correct date format in RSS feeds

The default RSS generation for FuseTalk does not use the correct date format for RSS 2.0 validation. Instead of a pubDate syntax of: <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0700</pubDate> FuseTalk uses the older format: <pubDate>2008-06-10 T04:00:00 +0700</pubDate>. I’ve modified the /forum/rss.cfm file to return a pubDate in the correct format.

Improvement 2: Include all forum content in RSS feed

FuseTalk’s RSS feed only includes the top-level posts. If a particular topic becomes particularly active, then users monitoring the forums via RSS will never know. The RMAUG site gives users the option to subscribe to a feed that contains all posts (top-level and replies) or just top-level posts so that they can choose their level of messaging.

Improvement 3: Aggregate all forum content into a single feed

Another annoyance for those who like to subscribe to RSS feeds to monitor the forums is that FuseTalk forces you to subscribe to many different feeds to receive all forum posts. For users who want to monitor everything, the RMAUG site has an aggregate RSS feed. In the download files, you’ll be able to create aggregate feeds for just top-level content, or that include all forum content.

Improvement 4: Use static files for RSS readers

FuseTalk uses CFM files in the URLs used by RSS readers. That’s OK if you have a small user base, but if you have 200 users subscribed to RSS feeds, and each person’s reader polls for new feeds every 15 minutes, then this page will get hit 9600 times every 12 hours! If each time that page is initiating a new query, then you’ve got a lot of unnecessary database traffic. Ick. To avoid this, the RMAUG site writes out XML files via a scheduled task. Not only that, but the XML files are actually named for the forum category that the represent, so no need to remember the category’s numeric ID. The generation files, as well as the single file that is used for the scheduled task is included in the download files.

Improvement 5: Put RSS options in the user profile

By default, users can choose which email subscriptions to use in the user profile, but RSS feed options are missing here. I modified the FuseTalk profile page to include all of the RSS options generated using the other custom tools mentioned above. Also, I went through the forum and made sure that any RSS references already in FuseTalk point to my new files. I’ve included the profile modifications in the download package, but think that if you’re modifying FuseTalk already, you can probably find the other references.

UPDATE (6/2/08): Made revision to the feeds/forum_top.cfm and feeds/forum_all.cfm files to ensure only approved messages are included in the RSS feeds.

Enhancements Include:

• Community Forums - where you can find group information, meeting archives, and ask questions of other members.
• Community Feeds - aggregates top Denver RIA and Adobe bloggers’ feeds.
• RSS Notification - gives you just the information you want.
• Follow RMAUG on Twitter - to get top-level RMAUG forum posts.
• Calendar - of upcoming meetings, conferences, etc.
• Better Email System - no more Yahoo! Groups or multiple messages.
• And, more…

We hope these substantial enhancements to bolster our on-line community and to keep members better informed of the group’s activities. Also, I’m planning to post some information on the work and learning that went into executing these updates in the coming weeks.

The next project is to re-work the administration section, of course that’s the thing that always gets saved for last.

Finally, big thanks to CFDynamics for the free hosting. We’re thrilled to finally be on a CF8 server.

So, I started sending people to: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to figure out the time difference for themselves. But, this link often goes unused as it just shows the offset of the current time and then you need to do some math… too much work.

Here is a very simple way to send date/time information to people to ensure that the meeting time is clearly communicated. Just hack the URL to the timeanddate.com site for your audience to use. That way participants can just click on the link to see when the meeting is held in their region.

Constructing a URL for the Word Time Clock

Example: a meeting planned for May 8, 2008 at 7:00PM MDT

Becomes: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=8&month=5&year=2008&hour=19&min=0&sec=0&p1=65

Root URL: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html

Parameters:

• day=8
• month=5
• year=2008
• hour=19 (use the 24 hour clock)
• min=0
• sec=0
• p1=65 (the time zone where the meeting originates, converted to a number)

Here’s some common time zone conversions (to get that “p1″ value) that timeanddate.com uses:

North American Time Zones

European Time Zones

South American Time Zones

Asian Time Zones

Australian Time Zones

If your timezone isn’t listed here, download this XLS document with all of the World Clock Options.

Of course, after I put all of this together, I learned that you can also just go to: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html and fill out the form, but what’s the fun in that?

And, while I could go into myriad excuses about why it is hard to blog about project management in real time (which it is, truthfully), I think I’ll just say that I’m planning to be more aware of RSS.

And, although ALA itself admits that there were some problems with the survey…

We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys (citation).

.. the results are pretty interesting.

Findings

Here are a few points that I found most interesting in my project management role. The actual report is 82 pages long, so this is just a sampling:

Project Managers Have the Highest Level of Job Satisfaction
Interesting to me in the “Job satisfaction by job title” section was that the creative folks - creative directors, web designers, designers - all reported job satisfaction levels below the survey average (page 47). The least satisfied job title is webmaster, so remember to give some props to whoever is updating your website today. And, while we’re talking about satisfaction, those working in a design, web, or IA agency were most satisfied, while the self-employed or freelance set were least satisfied in general (page 48).

Project Managers Don’t Blog (as much)
This, I can understand. When most of what you do is relationship building or dealing with proprietary information, it’s difficult to blog about your job. Still, 66.8% of project managers say that they have a blog… what we all write about, is still unknown (page 56). And, while the creative folks are least satisfied with their jobs, they must tell lots of people about it, as the ALA survey found that these people are most likely to have a blog.

Women Don’t Code
While most of the respondents to the survey were developers, only 7.2% of developers are women (pages 26 and 30). Yikes… makes me feel bad for defecting. Women are disproportionately represented in roles that require user empathy such as being a writer, user interface expert, information architect, accessibility expert, designer, or project manager (page 30).

It is startling to see the difference in perceived gender discrimination: while 4.9% of total respondents perceived a gender bias, 22.3% of women felt this way (page 60). Discouraging is the fact that as men earn more money, they are generally less likely to perceive gender inequality (page 66). And, there seems to be some salary inequality with more men than women with pay grades in the top levels (page 41).

]]>