If you have followed the a.c.pro Quick Start guide in order, then so far you have setup your organization, added some other users and created your first project. You have laid the groundwork to finally start working on individual items.
An "item" in a.c.pro represents a task in a specific project. Though you only need to create an item once, you can then continuously append comments to it in order to document your progress or carry on a dialogue with other users who are working on it. During the lifetime of a single project item, it may be re-assigned to many different people and its status may change several times until it is finally in a "final" status, at which time it is considered to have been completed.
The sections below will walk you through creating an entirely new project item, as well as locating and updating an existing project item.
Creating a new item is very straightforward:
Let's look more closely at those fields.
| Feature | Your project ("Quality Assurance") can be broken-down into features to help you organize your items. |
| Title | This is the short text that will show for this items when you view a list of items. It should be just long enough to make it clear what the item is about. |
| Description | Here you type a longer description of the issue. |
| Comment | The comment field is used to append comments to an item's history. You use it throughout the lifetime of an item. Typically, when you first create an item (as we are showing here), you would not type a comment -- then later you can have conversations with others regarding the item by each of you typing a comment and clicking OK. Each comment is maintained in the item's history, as you will see below when we update an existing item. |
| Urgency | Here you can indicate how critical the item is. |
| Status | Status indicates the state of the order. "Open" is shown in the example. The list of available status codes can be defined at the project level. |
| Assigned To | Here you indicate the current owner of the task. The list is limited to people who have access to the project. |
| Suppress notification e-mails | Typically when you make any kind of change to an item, an e-mail will be sent to the person to whom the item is assigned, as well as anybody in the "cc" list (see below.) But you can check this box so that e-mails will not be sent when the item is saved. |
| Cc | Here you can type a list of e-mail addresses to which all updates to the item should be sent. |
| Add cc address | This is a handy dropdown list to easily add e-mail addresses to the "cc" field. |
| Start date | The date on which the item should become active. Until that time, a.c.pro will ignore the item and not send out any e-mails concerning it. |
| Deadline date | The date by which the item should be completed. |
| To reach status | The list contains the same status codes as "Status", and can be used to indicate that a certain status should be achieved by the time the deadline date arrives. If you leave this blank, then the item will be considered complete when its status is changed to a status code that has been marked as "final". This is explained in greater detail in the "Quick Start: Projects" section. |
| Billing hours | You can use a.c.pro to track the time you spend on an item. Just enter hours in this field, then select the "type of work" you were doing when you billed those hours. |
| Type of work | If you enter billing hours for the item, you can indicate what kind of work you were doing to bill those hours. |
One of the important things to consider when reviewing these fields is that several of them -- those with dropdown lists that limit what you can select -- are based on properties of the project in which the item resides. For example, the "Status" field has a dropdown list that shows each status code defined for the project. You can have different status codes for each project. These project-level concepts are explained in greater in the "Quick Start: Projects" help pages.
There are a few ways to find an item in a.c.pro. If you happen to already know the item number, the fastest way to get there is to use the "go to item" feature that is always on the upper right of your a.c.pro screen. Just type in the item number and hit your Enter key, and you will taken directly to the item screen:
Another way to find an item is to view its project. Of course you need to know which project it is in to do this. If you do know the project, just click its name in the project list to open up a listing of all of its items. Then find the item simply by scrolling through the list. Note that when viewing the list of items in a project, you can hover the mouse over the item title in order to see the item description popup. That way you don't need to open the item to see its description.
So what do you do if you don't know the item number and you are not sure which project it is in? You can use the search feature which is at the top of the screen whenever you are viewing any list of items:
a.c.pro will search through all items for all projects to which you have access. It will then display a list of items that include the text you entered as the search.
As you look at the list of matching items, you will most likely recognize the one you are looking for by its title. If not, you can open each one until you find it, or start over and do a different search.
When you have located your item in a list, just click its title to open it. You will see the same fields you see when you create a new item, and there will be a new section at the bottom to show you the history of the task. In the example shown here, there is just one history entry: "12.08.2004 14:59:40: entered by Richard Jones and assigned to Bridget Smith". Anything you do now to change the item will also be recorded in the history.
A typical reason to open and edit an existing item is to add a comment to it. Every time you open an existing item, the "Comment" field will be blank. Just type in a comment and press "OK" to save it.
After your comment is saved, if you click the item again to open it, you'll notice that the comment field is again empty, ready for you (or anyone else) to enter a new comment. The comment you just saved will be visible below the empty comment field, as shown here:
Of course adding comments is not the only example of how you might modify an existing item. During the lifetime of a typical item, you will change it in many ways, including:
Each time you make any such change to an item, it will be reflected in the item history which always appears at the bottom of the item screen.