Project of the Month

Gantt Chart

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience for your heavy involvement? (which we greatly appreciate!)

To me, the community means the three most important things every company needs. The community is engineering: thousands of users bringing suggestions and doing quality assurance tests in all kinds of environments. The community is marketing: an easy and affordable way to get public exposure and acknowledgement for you and your product. The community is sales: companies and users have specific needs. With high quality products and market awareness, we are always on top of the list for those business opportunities.

What projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org? I see at least 16!

We have developed about 20 new modules for Sugar Suite. From significant interface changes to administrator's gadgets. Besides the Organizational and Gantt Charts, we have been improving campaign management with Power Prospecting module, implemented Team Security functionality, Microsoft Word document merge, added 3 new business-oriented themes, among others.

What were your thoughts or inspiration about the modules you submitted for the contest?

I always try to have the user's perspective of the product and use our business experience to understand how the software can make a company work better. From the technical point of view, we always try to make things modular (thanks Sugar for the Module Loader!) and build something that can reach as many people as we can just changing "internal parameters". This way we can share the development cost among customers. But, technical complexity does not mean value. Sometimes a very simple thing can solve big problems. Frequently less is more. Less code lines, more creativity.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

"The customer" has become a very complex entity, a tree with many branches. Unfortunately contact titles don't mean much nowadays. But everyone knows how important it is to be in touch with the right person. One of the other modules I created, the Organizational Chart, lets you have a visual representation of who's who in the customer account, easily rearrange the tree and keep the focus on the right target.

There was a time where projects were for engineers. Today, everyone gets involved with a sequence of tasks that must be done for a customer in order to meet a goal, whether the goal is closing a deal or implementing something. Those tasks, due dates, people involved and effort must be properly managed for success. This is what the unique Sugar Suite's Project module is all about. The Gantt Chart complements the module by bringing a time line graphic view of all tasks, assigned users, statuses and deadlines. No need for complex project management software.

What should users know about your project? Something hidden/ new in these modules? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

The Gantt Chart is drawn from the start and due dates of each task and listed ordered by the task order number. Usually, you just need to type in your tasks and click the Gantt Chart button. But here is a trick (we were saving it for the next version, after some more testing) that can help with grouping tasks such as main-task/subtasks. Add a new task and click on the milestone checkbox and number it. Then add the "child" tasks and type in the same number of the parent task. The chart will print the "milestone" task, and then the non-milestone tasks indented as "children". You can have as many tasks and subtasks you want.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Even if you are a user, you probably have improved software. You may have found a trick to do something, written a procedure to make things easier or found out about a configuration setting that can be very valuable to you. It happens to me a lot. You don't need to be a genius to be part of the community. If it is useful for you, it will probably be useful for someone else. Share it, and you will find an endless list of people like you, with a lot to give back. And don't be surprised, if somehow, someday, when you least expect, someone steps up to you and say "the new version has that feature built-in!". You will smile, I'm sure.