Early on in the development of Axosoft's OnTime, I made the conscious decision to focus all of our marketing efforts on software development teams.  But as many OnTime users have already noticed, the OnTime product is extremely flexible and can manage any number of project types, not just software development.

In fact, a growing number of our customers are using OnTime to manage team-based blogs.  Team-based blogs are becoming more and more popular and the editors of such blogs need a way to manage everything from articles to authors to their workflow processes: Articles go from a state of "New Article Request" to "Approved" (or "Rejected) to "Being Written" to "Ready for Review" and finally, to "Published".

I noticed there's nothing out there for team-blog publishers to be able to easily manage their articles and processes.  In fact, a Google search for Team Blog Management Tools reveals how badly such tools are lacking.  So I thought I'd write this blog entry to show how OnTime could easily be configured to manage a team blog. 

To make the example more real, I've decided to choose a real team blog, TechCrunch, to demonstrate OnTime's capabilities and how TechCrunch might use OnTime if they wanted to manage their publishing process.  Additionally, since bloggers love web apps and they hate installing any software, I've chosen the OnTime Hosted Edition for demonstration (all this cool stuff can also be done with the OnTime Windows client).  I'm also going to log my time from signup to full setup.  I want to see how long it takes for someone to configure OnTime for a team blog.  So here it goes...

Signup for OnTime Hosted

The OnTime Hosted Signup process is extremely simple.  Just a few required fields to create an account and Axosoft's Hosting Services kick in to create a full-fledged installation of OnTime with a private database and the web application within seconds.  I received the email within 30 seconds of signup:

The email contains a link to the custom URL along with the admin user's login information.

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 2 Minutes

Logging In and Initial Setup Wizard

The login screen is straight forward and immediately after login, you're greeted with a short Startup Wizard that helps you start the customization process.

Once logged in, the OnTime Setup Wizard kicks in: 

The Wizard asks that you change the admin password to something you'll remember rather than the 7 digit randomized password the OnTime hosted service has created for you:

In Step 2, the Startup Wizard asks what type of information you'd like to track.  At this point, OnTime uses terminology for Software Development Teams, but don't worry, we're going to change all that.  Here, we want to tell OnTime to just track "Software Features" (which we'll later rename to "Articles"):

In Step 3, you get the first chance to start the customization process.  Here, we'll want to rename "Feature" and "Features" to "Article" and "Articles":

In Step 4, the system asks if you'd like to track time spent on each item.  OnTime has a "Work Log" feature that allows users to enter the amount of time they've spent on work items.  If you'd like to track author's times on articles, turn this feature on.  Keeping it off will make the main User Interface less complex if you don't intend to track it (and of course, you can always change these settings later):

In Step 5, the Wizard asks if you want to create any sample data, such as a project, customer and a sample article:

Step 6 is just to address the two-browser world.  Unfortunately, with all the cool AJAX features of OnTime Web Edition, browsers tend to treat the same command a little differently.  For that reason, OnTime recommends using fixed-width dimensions if you are FireFox user and if you use IE 7, you can benefit from 100% of browser width:

In the final setup wizard screen, OnTime reminds you that you can access the setup wizard at anytime in the future from the Tools menu.

Now we're logged in and ready to go.  Here's what the initial screen looks like:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 5 Minutes

Setting up Users (Authors)

Even though OnTime is ready to go and you can start adding articles immediately, it's a good idea to start by entering and tracking all your authors.  So now we're going to switch to the "Users" tab:

...and start adding users.  We'll start with Michael Arrington as the first user and we'll use the built-in OnTime Security Roles (all roles can be customized, but the built-in roles will be sufficient for most sites and certainly for our sample):

Nothing complicated there.  We'll go ahead and add all of our users, so at the end, our users tree should look something like this:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 12 Minutes (includes time to add all 10 users)

Time to Customize

You may have noticed that OnTime is still using some of the terminology from software development.  Things like "Feature ID" as a field name or "Ready for Testing" as a workflow state, etc.  But all of these things can be customized, so lets start.

The first thing we want to do, is fix our field names.  From the Tools Menu, select System Options:

Don't be scared.  There are a TON of things you can customize here, but the vast majority can be left alone with the default settings.  OnTime does a great job of starting you out with a good set of defaults, but giving you the power of changing it all to meet your needs.  The area we're interested in is "Field Names  -> Article Fields":

Here, we just want to change:

• Feature ID -> Article ID
• Name -> Article Title

Next, we'll want to setup the Article workflow.  Now, I'm taking a wild guess here, but I've decided that the article workflow should go something like this:

Now, of course, you can have a much simpler workflow.  Even a simple "Article Not Done" and "Article Complete" workflow can work .  But for this example, we'll assume that TechCrunch has a workflow process that requires articles to be approved, by none other than Michael Arrington.  So to modify our workflow in OnTime, from the Articles Menu, select Manage Workflow:

When we're done with our workflow modifications, the workflow screen will look something like this:

Now OnTime allows for multiple workflow definitions.  You can create different workflows with different levels of complexity for each project.  This allows for more sophisticated blogs to have fast-track workflows for some types of articles (like those being written live at a conference), while more research intensive articles can have a different workflow.  For this example, we'll assume just 1 workflow for all articles as shown in the screenshot above.

To define the workflow steps, I went through and renamed the workflow steps from "Feature Requested" to "Article Requested" and so on.  Here's a walk-through of one of my workflow step definitions:

In Step 2, Actions, I make sure that the OnTime system automatically assigns a Priority, Status and Assignee to new Article Requests:

Step 3 allows for conveniences, such as opening the edit screen to edit the details of an article when an article goes into this workflow step.  In our case, we're going to leave the default settings:

In Step 4, Allowed Next Steps, we are able to enforce our processes.  For example, we can determine that the only allowed next steps for a new Article Request is "Approved" or "Rejected" and only Project Managers can Approve articles:

And finally, for Step 5, we're going to take the default settings (when in doubt, using OnTime's default setting is the safest route):

For each workflow step, we can also define a set of users who should be notified when an item goes into that workflow step.  To add users to the notification list for a step, simply select the step and at the bottom of the Workflow screen, click the plus sign to add Notifications:

One more thing we still need to customize.  OnTime's default settings include a couple of fields that are specific to software development, such as "Planned Build Number".  We can easily remove such fields from our implementation.  From the Tools Menu, select the Manage Field Templates option:

From the templates list, choose to modify the "Feature Field Template".  You can rename the template and also choose to uncheck all the fields you don't want to see.  Additionally, from this screen, you can choose any fields that you want to be required:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 21 Minutes

Ready to Start

21 minutes into the setup and you're ready to start using OnTime to manage your team's articles!  You can't beat that.  Sure, you could have used the default settings to get started right away, but with only a 21-minute investment OnTime is totally customized to work the way it should -- your way. 

So lets get going.  Go back to the OnTime Home page and from the Articles menu or the Articles toolbar, choose to add a new article:

Add all the articles you want to track using the same Add Article method.  After adding several articles, you might have a main page that looks something like this:

Lets examine some of the elements on this main page.  First, there's the "Users" tab.  By selecting a user, you can view all the articles for that user.  Selecting "[ALL USERS]" allows for all articles to be viewed, while selecting "[NO USER]" allows for articles that are unassigned to be viewed:

Then, there's the main "Articles" section that's a nice grid listing of all the articles.  This is by far the most powerful portion of the screen.  From here, you can easily add new articles, edit or delete articles, setup custom views, change your column settings (try drag-and-dropping columns), group your view by assignee, status, workflow or any of a number of different fields and also move items along on the workflow.  In this screen capture, we have the articles grouped by workflow so we can quickly see the stage of each article:

To change your grouped view or to move an item along on the workflow, you can use the appropriate toolbar menus:

          

The Item details at the bottom right of the screen show additional information about the currently selected item.  In this screenshot, I have the "Attachments" tab selected where a screenshot relating to the article is previewed:

And on the lower left hand portion of the screen, a quick Mini Dashboard indicates the status of the current items in view (based on user, filter and project selections).  This allows us to quickly see the collective status of the items we're looking at:

What Else is there?

OnTime has a tremendous number of additional features that can make day-to-day life of a blog team super easy.  Here are some additional features that I haven't covered:

• Ability to Automatically Check POP Email Account and Create Articles - Sites like TechCrunch that have an email address where users can suggest articles (like editor@techcrunch.com) can have those accounts automatically checked by OnTime. Anytime a new email comes in, OnTime can auto-assign the Article a workflow step (like "New Article Request") and assign it to a user. It can even put it into a project specific to Customer suggested articles where it's easy to find. Then one of the editors can quickly go through all the items and using the Multi-Edit feature, either reject or accept articles.
  
  
• Project Hierarchy - OnTime's project hierarchy feature is one of its most powerful features because it allows teams to organize their articles by department, category, type or whatever other taxonomy that makes sense. OnTime allows for project settings inheritance allowing each project to have its own workflow, field templates, etc. or inherit from its parent.
  
  
• Filters and Reports - No management tool would be complete without good filtering capabilities. OnTime makes it super easy to filter the articles view by project or by user. Additionally, you can create any number of public or private filters to show articles that meet any number of filter conditions. Everything from a particular workflow step, priority, assignee or due date. Once you have the right items on screen, running a report gives you a PDF-ready document that's good to print or email.
  
  
• Import or Export - If you already use a tool like Excel to manage your articles, it's easy to get that data into OnTime. OnTime has a built-in import feature that allows you to easily map the fields of OnTime to any fields you may have used in an Excel spreadsheet. Exporting couldn't be easier. Just click the export button on the toolbar.
  
  
• Powerful Security - OnTime allows any number of security roles to be created, each of which can limit access to projects and type of access, down to the field level. If you have complex security needs, chances are, OnTime can handle them.

There are a lot more gems once you start using the application.  I think the most powerful gem is that within 30-minutes, you'll be up and running with OnTime in a production setting using our new state of the art hosted environment.