Staffing Timeline Pro

View result of your planning on the chart
Add and manage your staff or custom resources
Define your activities/projects
Assign the activity to user or custom resource
Set working hours and add non-working days
Add markers to your timeline
Switch the timeline between activities and resources view
Track your changes with the change log
Need some help? Check the Staffing Timeline usage instruction

Inspiration

When we first heard about Forge Framework (late 2019) it started to be obvious that two of our Apps from Marketplace: Issue Links Viewer and Staffing Timeline are perfect fit for being re-written using Forge. Those Apps are mostly stateless applications - focused around presentation layer which seemed to be perfect use case for Forge. Once Custom UI was shipped - new development possibilities were opened for us - greatly simplifying development process.

We have used Codegeist as an opportunity to ignite the works - in order to deliver more secure, reliable and robust version of our good ol' Staffing Timeline.

What it does

Staffing Timeline Pro is used to plan activities including resource allocation.

Planning the work of employees is one of the most important stages of each project. Every manager holding such a tool can easily plan the work of his employees on projects. Good planning of work on the project will result in better development of a company.

Staffing Timeline Pro is an ideal tool for planning holidays for a company's employees.

Work on projects can be planned with precision to an hour or rounded to full days. When choosing the first option (detailed planning), the Working Hours (that can be set) come with help.

You can fix non-working days and take them on a Timeline. This function is very useful because assigning a user on a project which needs to spend a given number of hours and to list non-working days that occur in the meantime, will not be taken into account, when calculating the end date of the project. You have complete freedom of setting non-working days.

The result of planning is a timeline on which they are graphically presented among all the planned activities. The timeline can be freely zoomed in (eg. hourly zoom) and zoomed out (eg. annual zoom). You can also view a history of previous entries. At any time you can track the workload of each activity - just hover the mouse pointer over an entry on the Timeline, and you will see a hint informing you about the current progress in the percentage of a project accomplishment and date of commencement and completion of the project.

How we built it

Staffing Timeline Pro is the new, enhanced version of the application, which was reworked using the Forge framework with CustomUI. To create a user interface we used React, Redux, and Vis.js to render a timeline.

Challenges we ran into

Dependency conflict (some of the old dependencies were incompatible with new ones)
Problem with dialogs render, there is no way to use Connect modal components
Problem with fetching requests, there is a different way to fetch data on the Connect than it is on the Forge.
Problem with JS legacy code, some of the old JS was incompatible with what we could do on Forge

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to be able to easily convert our application to the Forge framework on time. This gives us more opportunities to improve and develop our applications.

What we learned

It was our first experience with the Forge framework. We learned a lot about how the Forge works, and how to easily create and share our apps.

What's next for Staffing Timeline Pro

We plan to change the way data is stored from application properties to Storage API provided by Forge. We are definitely going to improve the user interface as well. Also, an important thing is the ability to transfer data from the old Staffing Timeline to the new one - so migration module is to be implemented.