Chapter 3. Activity Management with openCRX

openCRX features powerful enterprise-class tools that enable you to

• structure and group activities in many useful ways; the concepts available - Activity Tracker, a whole set of Activity Types, Activity Links, Category, Milestone - allow you to capture virtually any constellation as it may occur in reality

• easily locate and retrieve information about activities and related objects - openCRX supports filtering (incl. user-defined filters), sorting, searching, drill-down navigation, back-navigation, etc.

• professionally manage activities - openCRX supports important management objectives like assignment of activities to real people (because real people get the work done, not anonymous groups.); openCRX helps you focus on activities that are urgent and important because openCRX allows you to separate important and urgent jobs from the many time-consuming trivial ones (see Personal To-Do List) and differentiate between severe issues and trivial issues (see Bug Tracking); with openCRX Work Records you can easily keep track of effort exerted by individuals and effort aggregated at different levels (activity, milestone, category, activity tracker) on a real-time basis and suitable for billing

• Monitoring progress, controlling, and reporting - convenient subscribe/notify services enable you to keep an eye on what is going on without manually monitoring progress, real-time charts provide aggregated information on all important issues, and project controlling is a breeze with all the different views on your data

• Multi-entity enabled - all concepts implemented by openCRX are multi-entity enabled, i.e. even the most complex deployment scenarios (e.g. Application Service Provider environment) can be handled virtually out of the box

• Audit trail - in various settings (e.g. financial institutions, healthcare, call centers, ...) it is absolutely crucial that every change to any data object is protocolled. openCRX takes care of all these requirements with a system-wide audit trail enabling the auditor (or other authorized/interested people) to inspect the complete history of any openCRX object

• Security - openCRX features enterprise-class role-based security which enables administrators to effectively manage principals, roles, and permissions; the powerful role-based approach to managing permissions enables you to control access to information with the appropriate granularity (e.g. access to team-information can be strictly limited to team members)

In the following chapter of this guide we look at the various Concepts that are available in openCRX. The chapter General Activity Management contains a discussion of all the Activity Types supported by openCRX and how you get a handle on them. Incident Management is an important topic in various contexts, e.g. customer service, call centers, Bug Tracking, etc. Reporting capabilities of openCRX are discussed in the section Reports. We also look at some Use Cases and how you can change the look and feel of openCRX by way of Customizing it.