Companies are the entities that group projects, tasks and users together. We use the term Companies - you can change that via a local Translation to another term if that suits your requirements, for example Groups / Departments / Customers. You must have companies in order to be able to create other dotProject elements.

Departments are subsets of Companies, allowing you to group elements such as users at that level. At the moment there are few filters throughout dotProject at the Departmental level but some are being worked on.

dotProject has users who are able to login to dotProject and work within the permissions scheme that you provide for them. What distinguishes a user from a contact is the application of a permissions role. Contacts can be assigned to projects to receive, for example, email updates, but they do not necessarily have access to the dotProject system. User's and contacts must belong to a company.

Projects are the overriding elements within which tasks are performed. For example, you might say that you are using dotProject to manage the process of Building Your House, so you could have a project called "Our House". Within that project there are then specific tasks that you assign to various contractors / family members etc. No task can exist without it being attached to a project. If you have a need for random / non-project based tasks then we'd suggest that you create a general project (we simply use a project called Odds and Ends). Other's may have multiple general projects if that suits their particular requirements or permissions issues (you may want to limit various people to various categories of odds and ends tasks for example). We currently do not support sub-projects but once we finish off the resourcing release then this will be in the pipeline for consideration.

Tasks are the actual work components or jobs assigned within a Project. Tasks are the components against which work is done, hours are recorded, updates (in the form of task logs are saved) and progress is updated. Tasks must belong to a project (but only one project per task), tasks can be copied or moved around projects. Task dependencies will not be fully functional until complete resource calendaring and management is completed in upcoming releases. The Task Module automatically includes the ability to record task logs or updates against tasks that can then be viewed by other workers / managers.

Gantt Charts are incorporated into dotProject courtesy of the great project jpGraph. Charts are available at the individual project and all project levels. There are some issues with Gantt in terms of locales and some memory / font issues which are being worked on (most are already resolved and in the CVS stable_2 branch) a new release for which should be available as early as possible in the new year.

There is a basic files module which allows you to store files against a project / within dotProject for access by project workers. There is some basic file versioning built into the Files Module. If you want extensive files management and support then you might want to look at an alternative package as we don't for one minute, pretend that our Files Module is an all singing all dancing document management system.

Discussion forums can be created against projects for recording discussions / notes / information against a project. Again, as with files, we don't pretend that our forum package is a world beating forum package. If you need more than a basic forum / discussion environment then look for a third party application.

Ticketsmith is a third party legacy package that was incorporated in the initial releases of dotProject for handling incoming support tickets. We've no intention of maintaining this package in releases from 3.0 onwards as the integration with dotProject is non-existent and the package itself is very very limited and does not seem to justify the amount of effort that would be required to maintain it. See Add-On Modules below for options.

System wide search module - within individual "modules" there are search features, smartsearch works across all modules.

New module as of 2.0 to create an XML backup of your dotProject database (NOT the program files / uploaded files etc). Very new and we currently don't recommend that you use this as your only security backup of dotProject.

There is a resources module which allows you to incorporate non-human resources into a project (eg rooms / equipment etc.)

There is an add on help desk module which has recently resurged into active support courtesy of one of the core development team who has offered to take on the task. The module was originally conceived as a replacement for Ticketsmith and has had a rather rocky history in terms of updates. It appears to now be powering ahead.

There is a first draft of module for integrating Eventum and dotProject. There are some limitations in that logins cannot be automatically shared between the two packages, but the module does provide viewing of Eventum issues from within associated dotProject projects. Please make sure that you carefully read the installation instructions as if you are using dP2.0.1 you'll need to update some files from the stable_2 CVS to make the integration work.

There is an invoicing module that allows you to generate invoices from dotProject Task Logs

There is one active timesheet recording program on the dotMods project (plus some inactive ones so check before you grab just anything).