Bye bye dotproject
I wrote earlier about our integration between Salesforce.com with dotproject, an open-source project management application. Well, after 3 years of using dotproject the integration is no longer. I’ve rewritten the dotproject functionality that we were using directly into Salesforce.com.
Integrations are great when you have multiple systems that each provide important functionality for you. What I discovered over time was that the set of project management functionality we were using in dotproject didn’t warrant maintaining the separate application and the integration. It looked like it would be easier to rebuild the key pieces inside Salesforce.com.
And that has turned out to be true. So, what did I build?
- A schema that adds Tasks to Opportunities. These Tasks are buckets for time tracking.
- A schema that adds Task Logs to those Tasks. These are recordings of worked time.
- Support for Invoices and payments to outside Consultants related to Opportunities
- An AJAX timesheet that makes it easy for a Salesforce user to record time
- Tools to make it easy to import Tasks from an existing Opportunity
What are the main benefits?
- Projects and time are in our CRM where the Organizations already are
- Projects are tracked as Opportunities, which is what they really are
- Timetracking is in our CRM as well
- I get to leverage the Salesforce.com reporting engine
- The timesheet for entering data has better performance than the previous PHP app we use. I am most pleased with this app–it’s pretty nice.
- Data is easier to maintain and modify because there is no longer an integration to deal with
- What I built is now simple enough that it would be possible to roll out for other Salesforce.com users who would like to track their time
Integrations are great when they provide benefits that outweigh their costs. We decided that this calculation was no longer positive, so we ditched the integration. In this case I think it was a good decision–time will tell.
January 17th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Oh Steve… words cannot express my gratitude for moving our time tracking to Salesforce. Being a remote user of Dotproject, the performance improvements in Salesforce are staggering. And, an intuitive user interface… blessed be. Thank you dear man.
January 17th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
My pleasure! While I’m really glad you like it, the IT load (and risk) it takes of Jon and I was one of the main motivating factors. Its great to be able to do integrations, but they’re not always worth it.