[Fiware-iot] Gantt tool investigations

[Farkas, Lorant (NSN - HU/Budapest)]

Dear All,

Wrt my action item IoT03_27.06.2012 I did a number of investigations and
would like to come up with a proposal. The proposal is at the end of the
e-mail, so if not interested you can skip the following parts until the
3. Proposal section.

1. Investigations on the existing toolset
1.1 Fusion Forge
-Fusion forge has built-in task management, available in the "Tasks"
-This would be very good if a graphic library php-jpgraph was installed,
because then we could visualize tasks, dependencies, deadlines etc in a
Gantt diagram
-I issued a ticket to have this library installed (most probably takes
no more than 5 minutes), this has never been solved. But since out of 21
tickets in the support tracker only 1 has been solved, and assuming
tickets coming from the coordinator are prioritized higher, I don't
expect this to be solved any time soon (even though I tried to convince
the guy in charge ... in Spanish in a personalized e-mail :-))
1.2 MediaWiki
-The Mediawiki also has an extension called JSWikiGantt that - if
installed - would give us the possibility to visualize Gantt charts
-I requested also this as a second alternative, there was no action at
all
-Data for Gantt is taken either from Javascript (one puts the data in
the code) or an XML file uploaded to the server
-MediaWiki does not allow to upload XML files. So I would need to change
the Javascript code every time we change the list of tasks (example:
tasks stored in FusionForge -> export to CSV -> script to update
Javascript code -> script to upload Javascript code to MediaWiki). This
is cumbersome, but feasible, but still we face the problem the extension
is (and will not be in the foreseeable future) installed

2. Possible solutions
-Here I looked for alternatives that are hosted (I don't need to set up
a web server in NSN), free (up to the number of members of the IoT work
package, possibly unlimited number of projects - we might need more than
one, in the number of handled tasks - because this might grow as complex
as we want), interoperable with "well-known" Gantt tools (Microsoft
Project and Fusion Forge CSV task exporter), has an output very
Gantt-like (looks like a Microsoft Project, can insert dependencies,
resources, deadlines, can set up notifications etc)
-I looked at a number of tools, as listed below:
	-Tom's planner: free only for 1 project, cannot invite others
	-ACE: free for up to 50 tasks and up to 2 projects
	-OPProject: free, but needs hosting
	-ZOHO: not free, basically
	-Project2manage: does not look too good, website does not even
display all graphical elements
	-Activecollab: needs hosting
	-Dotproject: needs hosting
	-Gantter: doesn't need hosting, unlimited usage, can export to
MSProject, looks very Gantt-like, no direct interface to forge CSV
exporter
	-Redmine: needs hosting
	-Asana: doesn't need hosting, unlimited hosting, doesn't look
very Gantt-like, cannot export, no direct interface to forge CSV
exporter

3. Proposal
-I would propose to start experimenting with Gantter
-The lack of interface to fusion forge is not a big problem, since we
have not used too frequently the tasks feature of fusion forge
-What this would mean in the beginning:
	-I will create a FI-WARE IoT project
	-I would invite all IoT members that I see from the mailing
list/fusion forge
	-I would start transferring action items from the minutes to
this project

Please let me know if you have any comments/concerns etc.

Thanks & Br,

Lorant
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