1. Introduction

1.1 About TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler is a project management tool for Linux and UNIX system-based operating systems. Whether you want to plan your college's shifts for the next month or want to build a skyscraper - TaskJuggler is the tool for you.

Instead of clicking yourself painfully through hundreds of dialog boxes you specify your TaskJuggler project in a simple text format. You simply list all your tasks and their dependencies and other properties. The information is sent through TaskJuggler and you will get all sorts of reports in HTML or XML format.

TaskJuggler does not only honor the task interdependencies but also takes resource constrains and prioritization into account. Using TaskJuggler's powerful filtering and reporting algorithms you can create task lists, resource usage tables, status reports, project calendars and project accounting statements.

1.2 Features and Highlights

• Automatic scheduling of interdependent tasks with resource conflict solver.
• Powerful project description syntax with macro support.
• Flexible working hours and vacation handling.
• Support for shifts.
• Multiple time zone support.
• Flexible resource grouping.
• Project accounting support.
• Task may have initial costs, finishing costs.
• Resource may have running costs.
• Support for simple profit/loss analysis.
• HTML and XML report generation.
• GANTT and PERT chart generators.
• Support for plan and actual scenario comparisons.
• Project tracking support.
• Groupware support by using a revision control system such as CVS or RCS on the project description files.
• Support for central resource allocation database.
• Support for cascaded and nested projects.

1.3 TaskJuggler on the Web

The official TaskJuggler web page can be found at http://www.suse.de/~freitag/taskjuggler.

Since the developers are mostly busy project managers themselves, we have created two forums for users to help each other.

The TaskJuggler user mailing list is hosted by SuSE. You can subscribe at http://www.suse.de/en/support/mailinglists/.

The other forum is an IRC channel at OpenProjects.net. The channel is called #taskjuggler.

1.4 Change Log

Version 1.0.0 (2002-03-14)

• Initial stable public release

Version 1.0.1 (2002-03-15)

• Fixed completely broken global vacation handling
• Added test case for vacation handling to test suite

Version 1.1 (2002-05-27)

• Added some reports to the example file, so users actually get a result of the TaskJuggler run.
• Support for later completion of task and resources added. By writing 'supplement task <ID> { ... }' an already defined task can be extended. So it's easier now to create a file which contains the vacations for all resources separate from the resource definition itself.
• Extended expression parser to work on string type values as well.
• Logical expressions for hidetask, rolluptask etc. can now contain functions as well. Currently there is support for 'istask', 'isresource', 'isaccount', 'issubtaskof', 'contains', 'ismilestone'.
• Moved the docs directory from TaskJuggler subdir to topdir.
• Added feature list and change-log to the documentation.
• Property reference is now sorted in alphabetical order.
• Added lots of missing attributes to htmlaccountreport.
• Added missing export report to documentation. Export reports can now contain the scheduled tasks as well as the resource allocations.
• New keywords planbooking and actualbooking to enter fixed bookings of resources in the resource declaration.
• Added new example project to illustrate the use of export in big projects that are split into sub projects.
• HTML comment in HTML report files is now using correct syntax.
• Partial fix for correct time zone handling.
• Support for STDIN reading and STDOUT writing added. This can be used when calling TaskJuggler from CGI scripts.

Version 1.2 (2002-06-17)

• Fixed sorting by ID for all HTML reports.
• Fixed bug in vacation handling. Vacations that started before the project were silently ignored.
• Added support for taskattributes.
• XML Output changes: Basically the XML output is more simple to parse, some values were added and corrected.
• Added a first simple TaskJuggler XML-output viewer for KDE. See ktjview/README for installation. Configure with KDE support enabled.
• Disabled ical support by introducing the HAVE_ICAL switch in the code. The switch is not yet configure supported, but building with --with-kde-support should work now without failing on missing libical.
• Support for URLs in HTML reports added.
• Legacy HTML elements have been removed from HTML reports. TaskJuggler now creates pure HTML 4.0 code.
• Added support for insertion of raw HTML code into reports. This can be achived with rawhead and rawtail.
• Added support for user defined style sheets in HTML reports by using the rawstylesheet attribute.
• Strings can now be enclosed in either single or double quotes. A single quoted string may contain double quotes and vice versa.
• Working hours can now be declared on project level. This also determines if a day is considered a working day or not.
• With startbuffer and endbuffer you can now specify that there might be some air left in a certain task.
• Remo's GANTT chart generators have been included in the Contrib directory.

Version 1.3 (2002-07-30)

• This release features some bigger cleanup changes. Some of them do break compatibility with older version of taskjuggler. While we try very hard to avoid such situations, we do prefer to have a consistent and logical language. Since the TaskJuggler user base is still comparatively small, we decided to break compatibility now rather than later. The changes are fairly minor, so they won't affect many users. Please see further down for more details.
• Added Perl/Tk tool to view GANTT charts and other project information.
• Added Pert-chart generator from Philippe Midol-Monnet.
• Added support for shifts in tasks and task allocations.
• Fixed vim syntax highlighting. Some keywords were missing.
• Export report had syntax bug when milestones were present. Fixed.
• Fixed handling of week, month and year duration specifications.
• now and timingresolution are no longer properties. They are now optional attributes of project. They currently still work as properties as well but a warning is issued and they will be removed in the next major release.
• dailyworkinghours and yearlyworkingdays have been implemented to allow the user for better control over the conversion from working days to working hours.
• Added support for a select function for alternative resource allocations.
• All load values in HTML reports can now be scaled by specifying a loadunit.
• Improved readability of scheduler error messages.
• Added new example project to the Examples directory to illustrate how to create shift schedules with TaskJuggler.
• Fixed scheduler for working hours around midnight. This bug affected shifts as well as general working hours.
• Extended timezone support. TaskJuggler will now operate properly when TZ environment variable is set.