Document Management in TaskHopper

Taskhopper was not designed to be a document management system -- but then again, it is. Using TH as part of a daily routine to run a business or organization will quickly cause others to realize the value of being able to connect documents to activity -- and having a way to quickly find them once the task is completed.

But what when you have documents that are important but do not pertain directly to a specific task? e.g., What if you're running Taskhopper in a manufacuturing environment and you want to post all related safety documents -- as tasks will require adherence to the same set of rules.

For this, Taskhopper includes Document Store, an integrated component that was created just for this purpose. Let's look at the two ways docs can be managed/stored within Taskhopper:

1. Task attached documents (TAD)
2. Global documents (things not specific to individual tasks)

In the completion of a task, it's often required that docs are included with the request. This could be to help define/explain the problem. Could be an image, a spreadsheet, a CAD drawing or a text file. A TAD is any file or group of files needed to support task completion.

Here's what TADs look like:

You can view or download a task attached doc. If the file is a JPG or something that can be viewed in the browser, the View button will display it in the same window. Download will produce the dialog box to save to disk.

What you will notice about TADs:

No version control. No expiration dates. No publish/unpublish. Heck, right now you can't even delete attachments. (That was intentional as we wanted to force the archival aspect of task efforts. If you easily allow attachments to be deleted, you lose some of the value of seeing all the steps that were necessary to complete that item.)

Adding/Maintaining Global Docs

All document management for Doc Store is handled via the back-end. i.e., Users can't upload docs like they can with attachments. There are two parts to this: Categories and Documents. Here's a look at how you would create one category and then upload one document:

Step 1 - Create a category

Catorgies are added from the back-end (admin) side

Step 2 - Add the doc

Once you have a category, then you can add a document to it

Step 3 - Publish the doc

The admin view of documents

That's all there is to the admin side. See! We told you this was simple! Once you have a document added and published, then users from the front-end will be able to view/access.

Accessing Documents (Front-End)

The Document Store within Taskhopper can be a menu item showing all categories, all docs within a category or you could embed a link within tasks to point directly to the document detail page. For the point of this quick overview, we'll show one category with one document within.

The "home" page of the Doc Store is a list of categories

When you click a category, it drills into all docs within that group. A list of documents will appear (in this case just one) that will display the following:

If you click the category, you see all documents within

To view document details, click the name of the doc and another page will be displayed showing the details for that single document.

These are the details stored for each

Limitations

We realize this is not full-blown document management because things like check-in/out and auto-versioning (naming) is not included. However, for applications where something simple, clean and quick is needed, Document Store usually covers most of what's needed.

Note: Doc Store was not included with the beta release, however this is a real product -- not just screenshot mockups. We wanted to keep focused on the core mission (doing tasks) which is why Doc Store was not released. When Taskhopper 2.0 is ready, this component will be included.

Also, Doc Store is fully optional. If you have no need for global doc storage, then don't install this component.