Redmine is probably the most underused collaboration and management tool existing on the open source market for 10 years. Decision makers within corporations are often unaware of Redmine's full potential and ability to expand in all areas of business just by performing several actions inside Redmine and agreeing to several conventions within the company. Almost all departments of a company can store its documents, collaborate, coordinate, and benefit from its usage over an extended period of time because in every business it's crucial to know who did (or who is going to do) what, when, and why. So for example, in software development, one Redmine ticket within feature tracker can tell us who is going to do what—fulfill the client's request, such as export report to Excel; why—because it is the customer's request from within project A; when—the date when tasks were scheduled or done. Additionally, we can take a look at how it's done using issue-code relation. However, this should not just be limited to software if it's a design project, for example. Designers can also attach their design to a particular Redmine ticket/task if they use repository to store files. If it's a janitor company, then they can store photos of before and after repair, and so on.
Instead of just installing Redmine and using its features out of the box, this book tries to teach readers to think outside the box, and customize Redmine to improve user experience, customize workflows, and harness the power of its flexible design.
Choosing the right management tool can mean the difference between success and failure of a project. Flexible project management tools bend themselves to fit your needs. Whether it's a simple project communication, collaboration, or more complex project methodology, such as SCRUM, or issue-code relationship, or different methodology for each project, this book will teach you how to quickly customize Redmine for maximal business benefits and user satisfaction. It goes even further than project management and collaboration, illustrating how Redmine's flexible trackers could be used for automated recurring tasks and processes. Additionally, readers are advised to visit the book's website at http://www.redminecookbook.com and take a look at the blog and frequently asked questions section.
Note
Redmine is open source and donation supported, driven mostly by volunteers who donate their skills and time toward the project. They also need to pay for servers, computers they develop on, and so on. Consider donating to the project through the following link:
Chapter 1, Installing and Running Redmine, provides several different ways to obtain and install Redmine. It then goes on to elaborate on how to run it with different servers, including Nginx, Puma, Apache, Thin, IIS, and Phusion Passenger with MySQL or PostgreSQL on Linux servers or in a complete Microsoft environment with Microsoft SQL Server and IIS on Windows Server 2012.
Chapter 2, Customizing Redmine, covers some basic Redmine customizations, such as customizing roles, homepage, extending projects with custom fields, and so on.
Chapter 3, Project Management with Redmine, shifts more toward management. This chapter teaches readers how to achieve some basic project management routines, such as splitting projects into phases or subprojects, using template projects, tasks and sub-tasks, creating reports. It then moves toward a bit more complex stuff, such as using and forcing issue-code relationship, and defining a roadmap to the release plan.
Chapter 4, Improving Team Performance, also focuses on management and team-oriented scenarios, such as organizing and keeping project documentation inside Redmine, putting the timeline to good use, making sure that everyone is informed, improving team performance, managing teams in different time zones, and one scenario of SCRUM and Redmine usage.
Chapter 5, Regular and Planned Maintenance, is written for system administrators, and deals with recipes, such as migration, upgrade, backup, and recovery that are required for Redmine's usage in production over an extended period of time.
Chapter 6, Performance and System Tuning, mixes recipes from system administration, Redmine tuning, and management to improve Redmine's performance and user experience by providing how-tos for new project creation, workflows, auto-login features, server tuning, and integrating Redmine with Active Directory.
Chapter 7, Integrating Redmine with Other Software, teaches readers how to interact with Redmine directly from TortoiseSVN, TortoiseGIT, or Visual Studio; or to integrate your own software or website with Redmine through API; use mobile applications, and so on.
Chapter 8, Getting the Most Out of Scripts and Plugins, deals with some Redmine plugins and scripts, such as pasting images from the clipboard, implementing and using recurring tasks, practicing Kanban, being Agile, using Redmine with Jenkins, and using CKEditor.
Chapter 9, Troubleshooting, provides solutions to common Redmine issues, such as installations, slow responses from server, how to get help faster, troubleshooting plugin installation, and so on.
Chapter 10, Making the Most of Redmine, is mostly business- and management-oriented, while also keeping some interesting content for Redmine administrators, such as improving Redmine security, using and configuring service desk plugins and custom queries, and wiki security.
You need Redmine installed, or a server (virtual or physical) so that you can install Redmine on it. If you are going to experiment with various recipes, then it's best to use some virtualization software, such as VMware, hyperV, or virtual box. Install a clean operating system (Linux or Windows), clone it, and start your work so that if you break something or want to try something else you don't have to start installing the operating system again, but simply clone the virtual machine.
Redmine Cookbook is a part of Packt Publishing's cookbook series, grouping various Redmine related how-tos in 10 chapters. The recipes have been crafted for people who are already using Redmine or learning to use it and extend its features for better project management, some other kind of tracking, collaboration, or process management. Also, single developers or teams can benefit from various recipes that are related to code repositories, bug tracking, software project management, and Agile methodologies, such as SCRUM or Kanban.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Aptitude is a Linux package manager that comes shipped with Ubuntu."
A block of code is set as follows:
ssl on; ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key;
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The next screen that you get asks you to configure Redmine automatically; choose <Yes>."
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