News from the Product Desk: Internal comments

With OpenProject 16.0, scheduled for May 21, 2025, we will introduce a new way to communicate with your team: internal comments in the work package Activity tab. This blog post will talk about why we developed this feature, how you can use it and how it might evolve in the future.

Conseil

Internal comments will be included in our Enterprise professional plan.

Why do we need internal comments?

OpenProject is as much a tool for team communication as it is for project management. In public offices, hospitals, universities and small and large companies, teams use OpenProject to manage the exchange of information.

Most of this information is contained within individual projects and our users sometimes work across multiple projects, each with a limited set of users with different roles. Each of these roles comes with a different set of permissions. For example, project admins generally have full, unrestricted access to the project, project members might have the ability to create only certain types of work packages or execute certain status changes, while external (non-project) collaborators might only be able to read and write comments. This approach allows for fine-grained access control.

In version 13.1 of OpenProject, we introduced work package sharing. This made it possible to invite users who are not project members to individual work packages in a limited capacity, with rights to only view, view and comment, or even modify the shared work package.

Sharing is especially useful when you need to involve people in very specific, small scopes. They might be external collaborators, clients, suppliers or observers. However, until now, anyone who could view a work package could also view all the comments in the Activity tab. This might not always be ideal. There might be times when a core team might want to discuss things related to a work package confidentially amongst themselves and keep that conversation separate from what is visible to all other stakeholders.

That’s where internal comments come in.

Internal communication

Internal comments lets core project members limit the visibility of certains comments to a select group that is a smaller subset of project members.

To use this feature, a project admin will be able to enable internal comments for their project. By default, these internal comments are only visible to the project admin role. To expand who can view these comments, instance administrators can grant a new set of permissions (to view, write and edit internal comments) to any number of roles.

Users who have these roles within their project will then see a checkbox under the comment box labeled “Internal comment”:

Checking this will turn that comment into an internal comment. The background color of the comment box will change to indicate this.

Once posted, the comment will also be marked in the same color, along with a lock icon, to distinguish it from regular comments.

Users without the necessary permissions will not be able to see these comments, nor that new comments were posted. They will not be visible in neither the Activity tab nor the other places where user activity is reported, like the user activity and project activity pages.

Use cases

Internal comments can enable more efficient communication within a project. They can allow teams to ensure all relevant information stays in one place, facilitate multi-layered communication when external clients or suppliers are involved and also be useful in helpdesk scenarios.

Maintain a single source of truth

A project can include a number of different stakeholders and not all stakeholders should be privy to all information. Ideally, all discussion around a single topic or work package should happen in the same place but because there are currently no visibility controls, confidential conversations need to currently happen elsewhere. This is often a separate work package (in a different project), a Matrix chat room or email. All of these introduce inefficiencies by introducing information duplication and blind spots.

With internal comments, all information and stakeholders can be gathered in one work package that is considered the single source of truth and core project members are nevertheless able to communicate amongst only themselves.

Collaborate with an external client or supplier

Projects often involve external clients or suppliers. They can be invited to a project or an individual work package with specific, limited roles. This reduces the need to organize outside the project context using different incompatible tools.

However, the core project team might want to keep some of their conversation private and limited to a smaller group, for example when discussing rates, negotiations, sensitive financial information or contextual information. With restricted visibility comments, the core team can have a meta-level conversation within work packages that external clients or suppliers cannot access.

Use OpenProject as a helpdesk tool

Implementing internal comments is also a step towards making OpenProject a capable helpdesk tool. Customer support teams can write internal notes only they can view, along with public comments and responses the customer can read and react to.

This will be supplemented in the future with other important helpdesk features such as the ability to set up OpenProject to automatically create work packages based on incoming emails to certain addresses and allow responding to comments via email.

Your feedback

We are excited to release internal comments this May with version 16.0.

As an open source software company, we value the ideas and feedback of our user Community. If you have opinions about these changes or have feature requests, feel free to join our Community instance and share your thoughts.

We would like to thank ZenDiS for sponsoring this feature. We hope you are looking forward to this update as much as we are looking forward to releasing it.