Boards can be for anything that you need to keep track of: managing your tasks, developing new features, prioritizing bugs, monitoring risks, planning sprints or releases, spreading ideas, anything!
The flexible boards view can be configured to your needs, it is easy to get started and fun to work with.
In OpenProject you can create unlimited boards with as many lists and cards on it as you need, name them and share work collaboratively with your team. Boards can be for workflow management, prioritization, visualization. New cards can be created, and existing ones can be added from projects or subprojects.
Lists and cards in your board enable you to keep track of your project in an easy and efficient way. Lists may represent a workflow, or a version, an assignee, subprojects, parent-child work packages or anything you would like them to be. Each list has cards on it that represent a work package in your project. Prioritize cards within a list or add them to another list with drag and drop. Action boards will automatically change the attribute, such as the status or version of the card.
See what is important in your projects and what needs to be done next. You easily get an overview of the status and next steps in a project.
Add more details, such as description, attachments, comments, due dates, assignees, and much more to the cards.
Select your board from a selection of six different board types. The basic board allows you to create flexible boards for any kind of activity you would like to track, e.g. management of ideas. If you move work packages between the lists, there will be no changes to the work package itself. In all other 5 board types, moving work packages (cards) between two lists will update them automatically, based on the list to which they’re moved.
Comply with your company's Corporate Identity and communicate it to stakeholders. With a custom theme you can upload your own logo and define colors for the header navigation, side menu, as well as links and buttons.
Your custom theme is automatically responsive: It is not only visible on desktop but also on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
In the administration you can easily customize your OpenProject theme: Upload a logo, a custom favicon and define custom colors. You can even set a custom touch icon to be used on your tablet or smartphone.
Many different styling options provide you a lot of flexibility when customizing your OpenProject custom theme and logo. You can easily and rapidly adjust your theme at any time. If you made a mistake, you can reset the theme with one click.
OpenProject Single Sign-On reduces the hassle of keeping track of numerous ID and password combinations, also saving time you would spend re-entering credentials for the same identity. OpenProject supports the main authentication provider such as CAS, SAML, OpenID Connect, Kerberos, and Okta.
Quickly communicate e.g. who is assigned to which work packages, how many tasks are still open and more. To give you maximum flexibility, you can choose from seven different types of graphs, such as bar charts, pie charts and line graphs.
As a result, you quickly see your project’s status and can act accordingly.
Highlight entire work package rows based on the selected status or chosen priority.
See right away which tasks require your attention.
Highlight the status and priority using custom colors.
The finish date is highlighted automatically: Overdue dates are shown in red, tasks which are due on the current day are shown in orange.
Intelligent workflows support you to easily update several work package attributes at once with a single click on a button. When a user clicks the button, the actions are triggered and e.g. the status, assignee and progress are updated at once.
Use custom actions to standardize your workflow, avoid errors and reduce workload.
Create your own custom actions and define when and for whom they are displayed. Choose from a variety of different actions (e.g. change assignee, status, priority, start / finish date, ...) to adjust the custom action to your specific use case.
Want to quickly find work package attachments based on their content? This is possible now thanks to the full text search. You can either search by the content of an attachment or by its file name. Simply go to the work package page and apply the attachment filters to see the work packages with those attachments.
Search the most frequently used files (e.g. text files, PDF documents, Excel documents, Word documents, LibreOffice files, ...).
Aside from full-text search, you can search work packages based on their file name.
Rapidly find documents by their name.
Work package attributes are combined into separate groups (e.g. Details, People, Estimates & Time). Depending on the use case the default groups and attributes may not always be the best fit. Use work package forms to customize the attributes shown for each type.
By default, the same attributes are shown for all work package types, such as Phases, Milestones, Tasks or Bugs. Often, this is not what you want. The start and due date may be relevant for Phases and Milestones but quite possibly not for Bugs.
As an administrator you can customize the types and define which attributes (including custom fields) are shown for which types. As a user of the Enterprise Edition you can also define attribute groups to further customize work package types.
Attribute groups work as headings and containers for attributes that fit together logically. By creating your own attribute groups you can directly communicate what certain attributes are about.
By creating an attribute group Customers for example, you communicate to your team members that attributes in this group concern your clients. Remove attributes that are unimportant and freely define the order in which attributes are displayed.
Once you adjust a work package type (such as type Task) the defined attributes and attribute groups are shown for all work packages of this type.
By setting descriptive attribute group names, project members see right away which values to set.
You can even customize work package types to show very few attributes or show only custom field attributes.
With this option, you can hide all non-essential information and communicate effectively with your team.
As a user of the Enterprise Edition, you can create multi-select custom fields for work packages (either of type List or of type User). Other criteria, such as required status, filter or searchable remain unchanged.
On the work package which uses the custom field, simply assign one or multiple values to the work package. The multi-select option allows you to select several options at once.
To enable multi-select, simply choose the multi-select button when creating a custom field.
Let's take a look at an example:
If a company develops products for multiple customers and creates a work package custom field Customers to track which customers are interested in a product, it makes sense to be able to choose multiple values for the Customers custom field.
The same applies for filtering work packages: You can filter for individual values as well as for multiple values.
In the example, this allows you to display all requirements that two of your customers have.
With the Enterprise Edition you can add relation columns directly to the work package list.
This gives you an overview of the relations for all displayed work packages.
The column will display a number of work packages that have a certain relation to the work package. By clicking on the number you can expand the list and see the work packages that have the specified type of relation with the work package.
Simply open the work package column modal and select the relation you want to display in the work package list.
You can either display the type of relation (e.g. blocked by, follows) or the type of work package that is related (e.g. Task, Milestone, Phase).
Use Case 1: Feature development
When you develop new features and test those features prior to a release you may find some critical bugs. In order to prevent buggy features from being released, you can create a blocked relationship from the bugs to the feature.
This prevents the feature from being closed without the bugs being closed first.
To get an overview of the features and the bugs that block the release of those features, simply filter for the features and add a Blocked by column to the work package list.
You now have a compact overview of the features and the bugs blocking the release of those features. To see which bugs are blocking a specific feature, simply click on the number shown for the feature in the Blocked by column. This expands the list of bugs.
Use Case 2: Release management
When you plan new releases, it is important to see which work packages are required for the releases. Showing this information is easy.
Simply create an includes relationship between the work packages in the release and the release itself. From the work package page you can then easily see which work packages belong to a release and how many have been completed.
Especially when you have many custom fields it is sometimes unclear what certain attributes entail and what information users should enter.
Create and manage help texts for project or work package attributes. Choose the fields which need additional explanation. Within the help texts you can specify exactly what is meant and what the user needs to do.
This is very helpful for complex projects with several specific work package forms and multiple custom fields. Especially new users become familiar much quicker with the work package forms. Furthermore, you reduce the number of mistaken or wrong entries.
As a user of the Enterprise Edition, you can specify attribute help texts in the administration.
You can select any project or work package attribute (including custom fields) and specify the description which is shown to project members.
Use the wiki syntax to format the help text, for example to enter headlines or lists. You can also enter links, for example to additional documents or company guidelines.
On the work package page a questions mark - shown next to attributes - indicates that a help text exists for an attribute. Project members can simply click on the question mark to show the description for the attribute (defined in the administration).
As an admin you can edit attribute text field descriptions on the spot, e.g. to make adjustments or correct errors in the description.
