Re: Resource Importing

Le Thu, May 15, 2003 at 06:11:12PM +0200, Mikael Hallendal:
> > It should be possible to import resources from your evolution address
> > book.  Or LDAP.  Or whatever.
> I agree that this would be a good idea. 

Not *so* good. Or not directly. An adress book in a mail agent might be
very large, say something like hundreds (or more) adresses. Are you
really willing to plan the work of so much people with a tool like
MrProject?

I think a good point would be to have a *kind* of interface with
something else, perhaps evolution or LDAP, but with a powerfull filter,
the main interest is to have a few goodies from that:
- not to have to re-enter all the resources for each project
- to be able to communicate informations automaticaly to the involved
  people

> > And I still think it's a good idea to link skills to resources.  In
> > Evolution, too.  This duplication of data stuff stinks.  Perhaps
> > Gnome-DB should be used to store contact information including all the
> > contact stuff that Evo stores, plus skill lists, and even GnuBucks
> > transaction information (http://www.gnubucks.com/)
> 
> Another solution for the skills is that we could perhaps have support
> for a resource to be in multiple groups (which could be C-programmers,
> Java-programmers, ... or something?)

It depends on the way you handle the groups. If you want to do "group
leveling" (like for "resource leveling"), it doesn't sounds like a good
idea: on the current model, the "normal" use for group with 5 resources is
500, on the model like the one you propose, you can have two groups with
normal use of 1000 (you have 11 resources, in which 10 of each are
C-programmers, and 10 are Java-programmers), in such a case you can have
the illusion that you have a 2000 normal use for the whole staff, and
you cannot any more use groups to compute that kind of things.

I think it's a good point to have a difference between skills and
groups. But I don't know if assignments can be computed from skills. It
can lead to some inextricable complexity in the schedulling process. And
if you don'y use it for automatic assignment, what is the use of such
information?

Regards,

	Benjamin.