Large projects involving multiple people and resources require some kind of tool that aids management. Resources, schedules, deadlines, employees, project scope are just some of the items that need to be tracked closely in order to have a sucessfull project. This tool will allow tracking and management of critical elements of a project cycle. The use of the Mozilla platform to develop the software will allow the tool to run across multiple operating systems and allow integration with internet, e-mail and address book functionality that is so crucial for managing large teams.

The feature set for project management software is incredibly large. One has just to look at the commercial offerings to see how large the scope is. The first iteration of this software is going to tackle a small but crucial set of functionality needed to manage projects.

Not coincidentally it will be focused around the needs of a Technical Director for live theater shows as that is the line of work I am currently in. I will also include some concepts I picked up from working in the software industry.

An initial list of features:

• Basic Data: People, Groups, Project, Tasks, Materials/Resources, locations
• Schedule views: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly. These should include the ability display the schedules for a single person, group, project as a whole
• Project view: Detailed information about the project
• Detail pages for all basic data (including milestones) - ability to edit directly from this page.
• "long pole" view: Are these Gant charts? Project breakdown by tasks and the duration of each task. Include dependancies between tasks. Timeline style.
• Milestones - link tasks to specific milestones, milestones linked to certain dates.
• linking to images - to tasks, projects, locations, people, groups. Need to be able to include pictures not just to aid in clarifying the display, but for archiving the project. Pictures of designs, prototypes, build diagrams, object models or whatever.
• XML storage of data for ease of implementation and portability. Down the road it might make sense to use a lightweight database to store data. (Mork! - not)

Features that can leveraged from the Mozilla infrastructure

• Email support to individuals, groups, projects
• iCalendar broadcasting of calendar data
• Web Browsing
• addressbook
• website creation - could be automated based on configuration. (low priority)

UI Design is a field unto itself. While attempting to adhere to some usability standards I am not going to try and write a new skin or develop an entirely unique UI. Instead I am going to use the tools and widgets currently available in the Mozilla platform. There may be a case where I need to extend the functionality of a widget in order to get a particular behavior that does not currently exist. That will be as needed and hopefully kept to a minimum.

What follows are some drawings of UI designs for the application.

This is the main window. I have chosen to structure the app much like the windows explorer interface, also like the Microsoft Visual line of programming applications. The tree/folder list on the left contains a collection of objects in the current project and clicking on them in that pane will change the display of them in the right pane. Also important to note is the mutliple tabs in the right pane.