Project Open

Project Open 3.5.0.0.1 includes some really powerful and easy to use ITSM Release Management tools. Well, powerful and kinda easy to use. Once you know the secret.

Now, this might be stunningly obvious to many of you, and if it is, please do feel free to ignore this article. But if you have ever wondered why your non-PO Admin users can't see the list of Release Items on your project Releases, this article might help sort things out.

Consider the simple project hierarchy shown in Figure 1.

From time to time, I want to see a snapshot of Project Open activity. Specifically, I wanted to see ticket creation and forum posting activity. So, I created a report with this query:

I like Project Open's User Interface (UI). The tabbed metaphor keeps the functions organized. I can find what I'm looking for quickly.

Well, most of the time.

Every once and a while, there's a particular screen or function that I'd really like, but that Project Open doesn't have. For example, I'd like a screen that shows all open items regardless of their stage in the workflow engine. I can barely program in TCL, Project Open's native language, and I really don't want to build or maintain any kind of separate program to display Project Open data.

Installing SSL for Project Open on Linux is easy as pie!

If you like cement pie.

Actually, like many things open source, once you find the secret keys, it's not hard at all. It's finding those keys that inhales your time. I'm happy to share what I've found in the hopes that a) it'll save you time and b) karma is real.

For this to work, you'll need to have the following already in place:

I designed PONotificationsBuddy to install with a minimal impact on the Project Open server. Because of that, you won't need to adjust Project Open's configuration files, AOL Server's configuration files, or PostgreSQL's configurations files to make PONotificationsBuddy work. However, you will need to install Java.

In Parts 1-4, I presented the concepts that I could exploit to build a Project Open e-mail notification system. In Part 5, I'll present the actual application, which I've affectionately called PONotificationsBuddy. You can download version 1.0.0 here. Or you can visit the SourceForge project page here. I used Netbeans 7.0 to build the application, and I left the nbproject folder intact.

Now that we have the queries to extract the workflow items and the table to track what e-mails we've already sent, it's time to think about the application to actually generate the e-mails. The application should have the following characteristics:

In parts 1 and 2, I presented the queries to pull individual workflow steps and closed items out of Project Open. The results of those queries represented the raw data we'd need to send e-mails. Trouble is, every time we'd run the queries, we'd run the risk of sending and resending and resending e-mails. That could become problematic. Folks could unfairly blame Project Open for inundating their inboxes!

In the first part of this series, I talked about building a query that will show all of the workflow tasks that are in-process. That is to say, I demonstrated a query that shows every step that represents a non-closed step in a workflow. That query, with a few modifications, will let us send an e-mail to anyone who has a workflow step assigned to them.

Project Open has a powerful, intricate, full-featured e-mail notification system, complete with opt-out functionality.

I hate to admit it, but I could not understand how to make it work.

True, I figured out how to tweak the e-mails Project Open sends when you open a new help desk ticket -- a technique, by the way, which also works with the e-mails Project Open generates when you edit a ticket.