[taskjuggler-devel] TaskJuggler 2.0 Released to public

From: Chris Schlaeger (cs_at_suse.de)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 11:54:36 CET


From: Chris Schlaeger <cs@suse.de>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 11:54:36 +0100
Message-Id: <200312011154.37474.cs@suse.de>
Subject: [taskjuggler-devel] TaskJuggler 2.0 Released to public

TaskJuggler 2.0 Released to public

November 27, 2003

The TaskJuggler Team releases the 2nd generation of their leading
OpenSource Project Management Software

After almost 9 month of development we are happy to announce the next
stable release of TaskJuggler, the most sophisticated OpenSource
project management tool. TaskJuggler 2.0 features a new XML input and
output format, support for more HTML reports and CSV reports to export
data to productivity suites like OpenOffice.org. TaskJuggler reports
can now be interactively browsed using the KDE Konqueror Plug-in. It
provides task list navigation and Gantt chart plotting. Old and new
users will also appreciate the much improved documentation and syntax
reference.

TaskJuggler was first publically released in March 2002 and has offered
numerous users already a sound alternative to MS Project and other
project management tools. TaskJuggler is OpenSource Software released
under the GNU General Public License (Version 2).

TaskJuggler 2.0 Features and Improvements

TaskJuggler Syntax:

  * Support for user-defined attributes has been added.

  * Resource allocations can now be made mandatory.

  * Resource allocations are now inherited from parent tasks.

  * The format of numbers and currency values can now be specified
    with numberformat and currencyformat. The old keyword
    currencydigits has been deprecated.

  * You can now reference environment variables by writing $(VAR) as a
    means to pass runtime values to taskjuggler.

  * The property projectids has been added. It is used in export
    reports to declare all the project IDs that are used in the
    report.

  * Resource booking periods can now overlap with off-duty hours,
    vacation or other task assignments. This is controlled by the
    sloppy attribute.

  * Several new query functions and operators for logical expressions
    have been added.
  * Scenario specific task attributes can now be prefixed with the
    scenario ID followed by a colon. The attributes starting with
    'plan' or 'actual' have been deprecated.

  * isplanallocated and isactualallocated had broken time interval
    handling. This is fixed now.

  * workinghours and currency are no longer global properties. They
    are now optional attributes of the project property.

  * The functions for Logical Expressions are now using capital
    letters to improve their readability. The all lowercase versions
    are still supported, but the recommended versions are now the ones
    with intermixed uppercase letters. isTaskOfProject was added as
    new query function.

Scheduler:

  * Effort based tasks now correctly recognize if the effort was
    partially specified with booking attributes. The effort is no
    longer allocated on-top of the bookings.

  * Length and duration tasks with resource allocations are no longer
    trimmed to the first and last resource allocation.

  * Fixed rounding error in effort calculation that led to the
    allocation of an extra time slot in some cases.

  * Fixed wrong scheduling of tasks that had a length or duration
    specified as hours or minutes.

  * 'length' based task now use the global working hours and global
    vacation settings as a criteria of what is a working day. The
    tasks now always end during working hours and not at midnight.

  * Various speed improvements.

  * The maximum allocation of a resource for a task is no longer
    limited by default. maxeffort now defaults to 0 (unlimited)
    instead of 1.0 (8 hours per day). To have the same behavior as in
    TaskJuggler 1.x version you need to specify maxeffort 1.0 before
    any resource definition. This change was made since many users
    were confused when after increasing the daily working hours
    resources were still only allocated 8 hours per day.

  * Several inconsistencies and off-by-one errors with respect to task
    end times have been fixed.

HTML Reports:
  * A new HTML report type for status report has been added. See
    htmlstatusreport for details.

  * HTML reports are now a lot more flexible. New CSS elements have
    being used and the table elements are customizable now. See
    optional column attributes for details.

  * All reports have now support for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly
    and yearly calendars. Task lines now contain Gantt-chart like bars.

  * Cost, revenue and profit values as well as effort values are now
    indented in tree sorting mode for all HTML reports.

  * HTML reports got the additional columns hierarchno and hierarchindex.

  * HTML Calendars have now a navigation aid. Moving a mouse over a
    cell will show the date and task/resource id in the browser status bar.

  * Background cells in HTML calendars are now merged. This makes
    taskjuggler report generation faster and reduces the size of HTML
    report files.

  * HTML reports now have a black grid to separate the cells. This
    enhances readability both on the screen and on printouts.

  * Fixed the URLs for task and resource names in HTML reports.

  * The broken milestone symbol in HTML calendars has been fixed.

  * Fixed completion coloring in HTML reports.

  * The scenario name is no longer displayed by default if more than
    one scenario is included in a report. A column scenario must be
    explicitly added if the scenario name should be reported for each
    line. The attributes 'showactual' and 'hideplan' have been
    deprecated. The scenarios attribute now controls which scenarios
    should be shown.

CSV (Colon Separated Values) Reports:

  * A new class of reports has been added. CSV reports (Comma separated
    values) are useful to import TaskJuggler reports into other
    productivity applications such as spreadsheets. The new reports are
    called csvtaskreport , csvresourcereport and csvaccountreport.

Export Reports:

  * The export report can now be a main project file as well.

  * A new keyword for taskattributes of export reports has been
    introduced. The keyword all causes all supported task attributes
    to be exported.

XML Reports:

  * Support for new XML format has been added. The old format is still
    supported. TJ can read both old and new format XML files but will
    use the new XML format for output.

  * XML version 2 files are now compressed with zlib.

Miscellaneous:

  * Much improved KDE Konqueror Plug-in to navigate through tasks lists
    and Gantt charts.

  * TaskJuggler can now create 'make' compatible dependency
    information.

  * The number of errors after which TaskJuggler stops processing is
    now configurable via a command line option.

  * Fixed segfault in certain cases of inherited resource allocations.

  * Macro names in macro calls can now be prefixed by a questionmark
    to suppress warnings if the macro is undefined.

  * Microsoft and MacOS text files are now read in correctly.

  * Report cells can be left empty and URLs can be omitted controlled
    by a logical expression. This is controlled by hidecelltext and
    hidecellurl.

For more information about TaskJuggler visit the web site at
http://www.taskjuggler.com.

The software is available for free download at
http://www.taskjuggler.org/download.php. It should compile on most
Unix or Linux systems. RPM packages for SuSE Linux are available as
well.

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