Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this - I couldn’t find a “feature request” forum.

I’m mainly interested in Tracks because of its multi-user features, but reading the documentation it seems as if each user install is completely separate from the other. What I would like to see, however, is the ability to share individual projects between users. So, for instance, if I create a new project which involves a group, each person I invite would see that project in their list as well. Anyone invited to the project could make any changes they want to that project.

The only problem I see with this is that each person might have different “contexts” set up. So here’s my suggestion - don’t share the contexts. The contexts for a shared project show up by default as a context called “shared” for all users, but they have the option to assign contexts that are meaningful to them if they like. Presumably, people would only need to do this for next actions which they are responsible for. So, if there is a project to “make a movie” and I am the producer - than I could add the “call Hollywood studio” next action to my “phone calls” context - but leave the “Hire Actors” and “find Location” actions under the “Shared” context.

It would also be nice to see options to invite new members if they are not already signed up.

Tracks looks great - I even installed Ruby on my iBook just to give it a try. Now I’m going to look into running it on my host.

We have talked about that kind of thing for the future, but there are quite a few complications involved (for example, how do you synchronise changes to shared actions/projects ‘live’, avoid conflicts because two people are editing at once, etc.), so it’s not likely to get implemented for a while. I want to concentrate on the core features first, and at its heart, Tracks is a personal GTD tool.

Another idea (slightly short of full project sharing, but still useful) would be to be able to delegate actions to others (after all, one action can probably only practically be done by one person). So you could ‘send’ an action to another user, who could choose to accept it into their list or reject it. If they accept, you would have an action added to your ‘waiting for’ list (or similar) to the effect that Joe Bloggs has accepted action X. When Joe completes X, the action in your list is marked as completed. That avoids problems of sharing context names altogether.

Yes - being able to send to another user and having it marked as “waiting” would be a great partial solution. I have assistants whom I work with on various projects and I’d like to be able to keep tabs on their progress.

Hi,
I would love to be able to send Actions to someone, which they can accept/reject.

In the model and code, where’s the best place to start working on that? Any shortcuts would be appreciated. Glad to post back what i come up with if it’s at all useful.

This would be super-helpful for our small team!
thx,

m

marqpdx: Hmm, I’m not sure. Perhaps it would be best to creat a new controller for ‘posting’ actions to another user. Then if they accept it, use the existing todos/create method to create a new action with the specified parameters, perhaps giving the recipient the opportunity to edit things if they want. If you reject it goes to todos/delete for the bit bucket. You’d need to know the username of the recipient, and there are security implications there.

I’d just have a poke around and see what you come up with.

As a note: I currently implement a multi-user solution simply by having I and my colleague log in under the same username simultaeously.

Obviously, this is not a scalable solution, but it works great for the two of us (manual refresh is needed sometimes, of course)

Mad props on your excellent software. It is a joy to use.

++ for Shared Projects and assignable tasks.

I’d just like to pile on to this thread, as these features would be very useful to us.  We’re trying out Tracks as a way to keep tabs on what our tech staff is working on from time to time.

Along that vein, is there any way to just see another person’s projects or actions?  That would meet all of our current needs.  Anything above and beyond that would just be gravy. 

In case EdCates or other users are still looking for the ability to view other peoples’ tasks:

The http://localhost:3000/feeds list could be quite useful for viewing data as text, rss feed or iCal data; view individual projects, or contexts, or Actions completed in the last 7 days (or other intervals, by changing the “done=7” to another digit).

Is there a way to subscribe to a Tracks RSS/Atom feed within an individual Tracks account?

I don’t believe there is. To clarify, there are feeds from an account but you can’t bring in a feed.

If you could have a feature which allows one to bring in a feed from another user then you could view other user’s tasks and Projects etc.

An Import feed funtion.

Anyone know anything?

Is there a way to subscribe to a Tracks RSS/Atom feed within an individual Tracks account?

Questions before this could be implemented would include: what does it mean to “subscribe”- is the goal to replicate the original item within your own space?  Do other users’ items go in a user-specific context, or do they get the same context as the original items? Does it make sense for you that all of the feed actions become Next Actions for you?

For me, someone else’s feed is going to be another inbox source, like my email which might as well be handled by a feed-reader, where only a small subset get turned into my own Next Actions.  ...Your workflow might be different, of course.

IF your goal is to replicate the feed actions and make their actions yours; this could be done by modifying one of the tools which uses the API to add new items from email (such as this one: http://www.getontracks.org/forums/viewthread/203/ )

The RSS feed has title, due-date, Project, notes, and Context.  It doesn’t have tags. So it might be technically reasonable to do as an add-on script.

@bsag, why a separate controller when we have a todo controller?

IMHO, the issue is authorization (who is allowed to create a todo for someone else -> user_controller) and notification (-> this is new; for accepting / declining and messages) and some behind the scenes house keeping.

I sure would love to see this cooperative feature implemented as well. It would multiply the usefulness of this web app for me 100 fold.

Thanks for the application so far though. Keep up the good work!

I’m still hesitant though. the maintenance it non-trivial and this will open a flood of enhancement requests for team management…