Non Admins Unable to Add Projects

[hutch619]

Are only users in the Admin Group allowed to Add Projects? I ask because I think users should be able to add Projects without having to get an admin to create one for them. Is there a reason why it was implemented this way? Because I think it makes sense that a company might want to give certain users the ability to add new projects (along with admin rights associated with that) without having to give them full admin rights to all of Fortress. Perhaps I am missing something here.


Fortress version: 1.1.2

[Beth]

I'm assuming you mean the projects for item tracking? That would be a major container in our item tracking schema, so it is an admin level task. Users then add items to those projects. In this case, adding projects is not a regularly occurring task. Are you in a situation where you have projects being added and deleted a lot?

On the source control side, admins create repositories and users can add their projects to those repositories. In this case, projects is defined very differently.

[hutch619]

Thanks Beth. Yes, projects for item tracking was what I was referring to. Perhaps we are not using this feature the way it was intended to be used. We are currently using them in conjunction with our repository projects in a sort of 1-to-1 relationship, if that makes sense. So if a user adds a project to a repository then we will want a corresponding Project for item tracking to go along with that. Any bugs or enhancements would be added as an item in the Project for Item tracking. Users would then identify which bug/enhancement they were working on each time they checked in code. Are we going about this the wrong way? How are others using the Projects for item Tracking?

[Beth]

How many projects do you have going?

Here we have an item tracking project for each software project, but a project lasts a long time. For example, Vault is one project, SourceOffSite is another project, and we made our marketing a project even though it doesn't have code with, and so on. Each one of these lasts for years.

You can certainly make a lot of projects in your item tracking, but if you find a new project being made every day or every week, then whatever is designating them as an entirely different project might become a category instead. For example, let's say you have a web application that gets customized for every user, and consider each customization its own project. You might consider instead of making an item tracking project for each customer, you might use one of the custom fields be for a customer name so that a query can sort the tasks out by customer. Or maybe make a category for each.

Can you give me an idea of how many projects and what type they are? Are they even remotely related to each other in any way?

[hutch619]

Interesting. I never really understood how the categories were supposed to be used. The fact that you can assign a Developer and/or Resolver is what I think was confusing me.

As to what our structure looks like, we currently have 1 repository with 6 main directories containing around 70 projects to date:
+ Demos : 1 Project, "How-To" projects (possibly moved over from Tests)
- DLLs : 0 Projects, pinned DLLs from Libraries projects for Projects to reference.
+ Libraries : 28 Projects, Various interfaces to FedEx/UPS, our MIS server, Clients)
+ Software : 11 Projects, Mostly internal GUI apps interfacing with our MIS.
+ Tests : 13 Projects, Used for testing misc things such as technologies
+ Web Sites : 17 Projects, fulfillment sites for clients and internal sites for various tasks

Projects in the "Software" directory often reference DLLs from our Libraries via the DLLs directory and the majority of these projects are written in .NET. I was planning on adding a separate repository for all the MS Office Apps that we have around here since they are written in vba and don't use any of the libraries listed above. We probably have around 20 to 30 office apps that we are going to be adding to Fortress.

I'm going to have a non-admin add these projects to Fortress so it seems only logical to me that they should be able to have Project tracking available for a Project they create, without an admin needing to get involved.

Personally I think it would be great if this was all created by default when a project is added to Fortress. I think what makes it difficult is that there is currently no way of identifying what is a project and what is a folder inside the Fortress Client. Perhaps if there were a way to identify a particular folder as being a project (maybe via a right click) then you could automate setting up the corresponding Project Item Tracking for them. it would also be nice to have a different icon for Project Folders and maybe also a different color for a folder that contains Project(s). Just a thought

[Beth]

I can put in a feature request to allow non-admins to add projects if you would like.

For right now though you have a couple different things you can do.

One is that you can continue the way you are going and have many, many projects, but the administrator will have to be the one to create those. This one will have the least amount of complexity and might be much simpler for you and your company.

Another option might be to create just a few projects that represent larger groupings, such as Demos, DLLs, Software, Libraries, etc., and then have categories represent smaller divisions. Then you can make a user be a Project Admin, where they can make changes to the settings for one or more individual projects that you give them rights to, and they can make a category for each smaller division instead of needing the top level admin to do that. This is just an example. I haven't set up projects this way before, so I don't know what kind of divisions would really be the best way to go.