OpenProject’s highlights 2022

We are closing off 2022 and are looking back at an exciting year. It brought amazing new features to the OpenProject application as well as great changes to the way we work at OpenProject.

We are especially proud about our focus on data protection, data sovereignty, open source and open standards that are becoming more and more important in the world. We are doing our very best to offer an efficient and above all secure open source project management software.

Let us share some of our highlights from 2022 with you.

Souveraineté des données

Sovereign workplace

We at OpenProject believe in digital sovereignty and software freedom. That is why we support open source software for the public sector and joined the product strategy board for the development of the “Sovereign Administrative Workplace”. This project is led by the ZenDiS project group of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and Dataport AöR and aims at building a powerful open source collaboration suite for the public sector. Element, Nextcloud GmbH, Univention, Collabora and Open-Xchange join forces to develop the best open source web-based collaboration platform. Software, made in Europe — made for Europe.

This project will keep us busy in 2023 as well and we are looking forward to sharing the latest developments with you.

Collaboration and integration with Nextcloud

In 2022, we continued our collaboration with our friends from Nextcloud to enhance file management in OpenProject.

For both OpenProject and Nextcloud data sovereignty and open source are an integral part of their strategy, and that is why this collaboration brings the most secure way to combine project management and file management for mutual users.

After the first step of the development which brought the integration of OpenProject in the Nextcloud dashboard and search, we have now extended the functionality to link and display Nextcloud files and folders in OpenProject. Consequently, the productivity of users of both platforms increases significantly. No more endless searching for files. In OpenProject, you can now find files directly in the respective work package.

We are delighted about our collaboration with the Nextcloud team and are looking forward to more integration enhancements in 2023.

New features

We are continuously striving to improve OpenProject. This year we have again launched a lot of new features, specified, designed, developed, tested, documented, improved code, fixed bugs, implemented UX and UI improvements.

Planificateur d’équipe

A new team planner module allows you to visually assign tasks to team members to get an overview of who is working on what. You can display all work packages assigned to your team in a weekly or bi-weekly view. With drag and drop, you can easily assign the work packages to other team members and also change the duration.

Work week and duration of work packages

In 2022, with OpenProject 12,3, we introduced the work week. The administrator can globally specify working and non-working days and consequently define a work week. This helps you to create more accurate project schedules and avoid having start or finish date of a work package on a weekend. Non-working days are displayed grey in the calendar and work packages cannot be scheduled to start or finish on those days.

With the launch of the work week, the work packages also received the attribute duration. It allows you to schedule your work packages faster by using the new duration field. The duration is always expressed in days and is the number of days between start and finish dates and excludes non-working days.

Alertes de date

In 2022, we were able to develop a long awaited feature, date alerts. These are reminders for upcoming due dates (start or finish date) and for overdue tasks.

Within the Notification settings in My Account, you can configure automatic notifications when important dates are approaching for open work packages you are involved in (as assignee, accountable or watcher). For approaching start dates or finish dates you can choose between a reminder on the same day, 1 day before, 3 days before, or a week before the due date. Additionally, you can set a reminder for overdue work packages for every day, every 3 days, or every week. This way, you will never miss an important due date in your OpenProject application.

2022 features for the free Community edition

We develop new features which cannot always be made available straight away for the Community edition. We try to do our best to keep a balance between the new features for the free of charge Community edition and the features that are only part of our paid Enterprise version. Please rest assured that we keep giving features back to the Community. This year, we enabled two major features for the Community edition.

Agile boards

We decided to release the basic agile boards for the Community. Making it possible to also create agile boards with the free of charge Community version of OpenProject. These flexible basic agile boards allow you to set up any kind of agile board you need. Freely configure the lists (columns) which should be displayed and add and move cards between these lists.

2-Factor Authentication

OpenProject stands for data security and privacy. That is why we were especially happy to make the 2-factor authentication feature available to the Community edition which will add an additional security layer to your application. Please make sure to configure it in your system’s Administration -> Authentication settings and also activate it in your My Account settings for individual users.

More convenience for OpenProject users

We have a global customer base and consequently drive the translation of OpenProject and all related material into our users’ mother tongues. This is only the start, we aim in 2023 to translate our website into more languages as well as providing our onboarding tour and the creation of a trial instance in more languages.

OpenProject documentation in German

We would like to make it as comfortable as possible for you to get to know and work with OpenProject. And reading a documentation in a foreign language is not easy. That is why we started the translation of our documentation.

Since the OpenProject headquarters are Berlin, we have many German users and thus started translating the documentation into German first. The Getting started guide, Grundlagen Handbuch, and the user guide, Nutzungshandbuch, are now available in German.

OpenProject website in French

To cater for our growing French community, we translated our website into French. We are really happy to see that our users are spending a lot of time browsing our website in French.

The OpenProject team

The best part of growth are the new team members who strengthen and professionalize the team. We were able to grow again as a team and welcomed many new colleagues. OpenProject’s success can only be attributed to a great team that does extraordinary things together. Welcome to all new team members.

A growing team

We are very proud that our team grew by 9 members in 2022. We welcomed additional team members to our technical support as well as the development and marketing team. By hiring our first QA responsible, we professionalized our QA process. And on top, we are very happy that we have been able to retain our working student in the development team who is now working full time for us.

Team meeting

Clearly a highlight in 2022 was our team meeting in September in the outskirts of Berlin. We work so incredibly well as a remote team but nothing can replace spending time face to face. That is why we focused on socializing during the three days we had together. And we enjoyed every second of it.

We all are so proud of what we have achieved this year. This would have never been possible without such an amazing team, a great community, and many active users and customers. Thank you so much, you keep us going!

Here is to 2023! Keep on collaborating – with open source and open mind.