Sync Projects to your local calendar
We have implemented a feature that lets you sync Projects from Sosius to your local calendar, in the same fashion as you sync calendars. Your local calendar will display the Project name, task titles, start and due dates, as well as links to the actual tasks in the service. Seeing as we use the iCal format for this, you can also add your project-tasks to calendars in Sosius this way, just like you would subscribe to an external Google calendar or similar.
Reset Permissions and Ownership
On the Manage Existing Permissions page for any item, we included a new option simply titled Reset. Here you can with the click of a button remove permissions and ownership of items (with the option to cascade children). This means that you can copy/move material, and very quickly remove any unwanted ownership/permissions that came along.
ACL Improvements (Navigator Folder visibility)
First of all, allow me to state how excited I am to bring you such a seemingly technical and boring feature! To explain I will use a couple of examples.
The navigator has always been somewhat problematic because it exposes items located in the parent node. So for instance if you in the below example, only had access to Subfolder 2, you would still see Subfolder 1 and Subfolder 3 as well, even though you could not access them.
While this might seem like an insignificant detail, the fact of the matter was that it limited the flexibility of our folder structures.
Now we have changed this, striving towards the concept: You only see what you have access to. Meaning that in the above example, where you only have access to Subfolder 2, this is all you will see:
Picture Folder as a Sales-team, and each of the Subfolders as different Clients, who should not know of each-other, and it gets easy to see how valuable this is when creating folder structures that needs to fit your own companies needs, as well as your clients.
Expanding on that concept, we also made some changes to how items in the "Content window" are displayed. Take the following example: You have access to Folder, but you have explicitly been denied access to Subfolder 1 and Subfolder 3 - we now use the same concept: you only see what you have access to:
As Subolders 1 and 3 are no longer visible in this scenario, this means no more fumbling around creating unnecessary root workspaces, navigator-disabling, or ill-conceived use of the hidden functionality.
One thing to be aware of is that the breadcrumbs needs to be visible in order to maintain navigation and the URLs (this example: Sosius >> Folder), so any parent nodes will be visible. This means that a good practice from now on will be to name these main categorizing folders "discretely".
Depending alerts
When you are using the project tool, a lot of times it makes sense to set up a task as being dependent on another. So what you really want to see when you are finished with the first task, is an alert being sent out to the person who is assigned to the next task. We have changed the issue response page to include an option to Alert Depending Members, which allows for just that.
Other improvements from this update
To reduce the length of this blog, I will try to summarize the other, smaller items we have been working on this month more briefly: