Tasks & Calendar extended to be used as project management tool

🏷️ General
1

Feature request:
Since NextCloud enables and supports users to work in a “distributed” & “shared” environment,

the next logical step would be to combine the calendar & tasks app into a classical
“Project Management” app, including :
Scheduling
Critical path
Cost accounting
Reporting
Presentation, etc.
Perhaps an existing tool (or parts of it) could be modified, integrated and extended to meet NC requirements !
Creating a new project “Project Management” would be another possible solution!
I am looking forward to discussing this issue!
regards, hitam4450

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Building up a project management application is a big task with a lot of person-years of work. I recommend to use one of the ready-to-use open- and closed source solutions out there eg. https://redmine.org/

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I highly doubt that you can reuse anything from Tasks and Calendar for creating a project management application. Those things are basically unrelated :slight_smile:

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I was searching and testing some solutions.
To my opinion the only real alternative to MS is ProjectLibre.

Currently a Java-client but they are working on a cloud version.
But as they want to earn money with subscriptions, it does not sound line a LibreOffice aproach ;-(

I think this is a too complex task - even looking how far PL is still away from the oroginal.

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Thanks for your valuable input and feedback.

In the past and up to now I use OpenProjet ( https://www.openproject.org and https://github.com/opf) as a standalone tool for managing my projects. Since i am not a professional developer, it is difficult for me, to make a judgment about rewrite and combine of existing application(s), develop a brand new application or integrate an existing app.

The reasoning behind it, is pretty simple: Since NextCloud favorites the “collaborative” approach of cooperation, which is the approach for a successful project Management in a distributed environment. Such an integrated tool into NextCloud, could be a success for the development of NEXTCloud itself!

I am looking forward to continuing the discussion!

regards, hitam4450

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While having project management available as an app world, no doubt, be useful, the issue still remains that this is a huge undertaking that we can’t spare pulling devs from Nextcloud away from. Accordingly, it really would need to be someone creating an app that integrated a current cloud solution (preferably FOSS), which comes back to which platform, how and by whom?

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Personally I also doubt that Nextcloud is the right platform for such a tool. While collaboration is awesome it’s hard to do well in PHP since you want websockets. It’s probably better to integrate it in a separate tool and implement single sign on and LDAP

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A client app which reduces switching between applications would be a first step, additional features could be implemented step by step !

regards, hitam4450

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See also this post for a similar yet different approach:

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My opinion is that Nextcloud is fundamentally a file sharing and storage app.
I don’t think at all it should include project management or there to be need of a next step.

I do however think metadata about the files and folders is missing and a logical step overlooked.
The files and folders are central to all apps and we should be able to link app entities against a file or folder.
Its just a foreign key of entity_id & entity_type against filesystem_id and the simplistic base structure needs to be in the core.

If its not a common method in the core then any metadata/linkage developer will have to interface to all other apps and know there data structure.
Its not going to happen as it would be a nightmare to implement and support.

If it was part of the core and a requirement for app developers to register entities types and provide a json for iteration and retrieval, then it all becomes standard and quite easy to accomplish.
Each app currently provides bespoke methods for file system relationships and each app is an an island of excellence, but poorer because of the isolation.

An app developer will never be able to dictate to the other app developers how this should be done and I can only see it ever happening if the basics are implemented in the core.

Simple things like linking a contact to a folder or files, should be the same as an event, task, user, contact or note and its the same mechanism and it just doesn’t make sense for each app developer to provide this.
Its the same method to link a contact to an event, task or note and because it is a common method, that is the reason it should be in the core.

All we are missing is a table of left_entity_id, left_entity_type, right_entity_id, right_entity_type.
The app provided json for entity iteration and field retrieval dictated for next release and it would open up the app market and create a more extensible system with lower development overheads when creating linkages between entities and reducing the isolation between apps.
There is very little core work to be done, apart from dictating a common method for linkage.

If there was a linkage method (metadata) then the project management entities could be added by an app developer as a large part of project management is collating metrics against entities, this is try of a plethora of apps.

Currently tags are part of the core but actually they are purely another entity type, but for some reason have preference and difference over the others as they are core, I just don’t get it as the app is provided rather than the common method.

The exclusions are closing extensible options, that don’t need to be part of the core.

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Nextcloud is more and more developing into a collaborating environment on all levels and in all areas! A PM app makes sense, since it is the best sample for collaboration !

regards, hiatm4450

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I’d like to parcipate also in this general discussion. At the moment, we are in the tool orientation phase. We were thinking of an openproject/nextcloud approach, but the beginnings of the new collaboration environment look very interesting.
Like others in this thread, the only thing that we miss is a real project tool- isn’t there anybody who can do this?
regards, sneaky

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instead of waiting for another tool to come around what is integrated into NC it could be better to go for better integration with existing tools.
Paths to follow are outlined in Taiga, Trello, WeKan via n8n and Deck / Flow - :bento: Features & apps / deck - Nextcloud community