Glossary

The following terms are commonly used in Planzone.

Activity

An activity is a specific item or phase with scheduled dates within a project's schedule. Activities can be organized in a hierarchical structure, so that a parent activity can have sub-activities up to 5 levels deep. Activities can be assigned to one or more resources with allocated hours.

Project activities are listed in a project's Schedule page. Activities assigned to project team members are listed by date and alphabetic order on a Planzoner's My activitiespage.

Alert

Alerts are notifications of actions that have occurred within the Planzone service on your projects or are related to your Planzone invitees. You can select the amount of alerts to display by date. There are 2 types of alerts: « personal » and « public ».

« Personal » alerts are generated directly from your actions or actions from others that directly affect you.

« Public » alerts are notifications of actions that affect the entire community using the Planzone service.

Allocation

This is a specific amount of time that a resource is assigned to complete a project activity. Activities may have one or more allocations. Allocations on sub-activities are totaled together and added to any allocation for a parent activity.

Assignment

Assignments refer to project activities that have been given to a project team member to execute. Assignments are done by a project manager. Project activity assignments differ from to-do assignments because they have a specific time allocation attached to them.

Discussion

Discussions may be associated with different things in Planzone. To-dos and milestones have one discussion where the to-do or milestone title is used as the discussion subject. Other Planzone features such as projects, documents and activities may have multiple discussions associated with them, each discussion having a different subject. The project team members can start a discussion and add comments in a discussion.

Document

A document is a file that is stored in the document management area within a project. This area can be organized in folders. When a new file is uploaded, the previous version is kept in the document history. Individual documents can be of any type and up to 200 MB in size.

Folder

This is a specific shared storage area for project documents. Folders are found in the project's Documents tab. Folder names are displayed along the left side of document lists. The "Public folder" is a default location for all project documents. Project managers may create folders to group documents by type or category. Project managers can also set specific access rights for each folder limiting who on the team can see the folder and edit the documents within.

Group

Project team members or Planzone members can be organized into groups. These groups can then be used to quickly send e-mails or assign to-dos and activities.

Mail Reports

These are specifically formatted e-mail concerning Planzone or project activity sent by the Planzone service. The frequency on which the report is generated and sent can be set by a Planzone member using the Edit mail report settings option under My account.

Currently there is one report available, the Planzone Activity Report. This is a summary of different actions that have occurred within a specific Planzone along status on a member's pending and overdue to-dos and activities.

Menus

There are 5 types of menus within the Planzone service:

Planzone navigator – This is the main navigation menu at the top left of all Planzone pages. The higher part displays the currently selected Planzone and that Planzone's logo. By clicking on this area you can always go back to the Planzone's home page. The lower part allows the user to select a project among all open projects in which he is a team member. The link Other Planzones can be used to switch to another Planzone (or create a new one). The link Administration gives access to the administration features of Planzone.

Tabs – This is a row of tabs across the screen. The tabs are different if you are in a project, in the Home section or in the Administration section.

Views – Some tabs have several views, which offer different ways to display information. When available, this view menu is displayed directly under the tabs. In other cases the view menu is replaced by the search component.

Page menu – These are icons and text found on the right under the sub-tabs. When present, these allow a Planzoner to perform different actions specific to that page, such as get contextual page help, print or export page information to Excel, or subscribe to a RSS feed.

Planzone service menu – This is a text menu at the very top right of every Planzone page. These are actions specific to a Planzoner and provide access to general Planzone services such as feedback and help.

Milestone

A milestone is an important date in the life of a project. It is often related to a project deliverable or event.

Only users with Project management permissions in a project can manage (i.e. create and edit) milestones on a project.

My Account

This is a set of options that customize a user's display and general operation across all of a member's Planzones. These are managed by selecting the My account link in the Planzone service menu. This includes:

Profile – options to set a member's name, e-mail address and image

Preferences – options to set the service language, time zone, date and time formats

Change password – an option to re-set a member's password

Mail report settings – options to customize frequency and type of automatically generated Planzone reports

Alert settings – options to include or exclude notifications of certain actions along with the how the notification is received (within the Planzone only or also by e-mail)

Help settings – options to enable or disable the "Quick Start" assistant on all pages

Planzone

A Planzone is a collaborative space that is created by a user (the Planzone Owner), in which other Planzone members can be invited to participate in projects.

A Planzone has a subscription which determines the maximum number of projects that can be created, the maximum number of Planzone members that can be invited and the maximum storage space that can be used for documents inside this Planzone. The Planzone Owner can upgrade the subscription plan to extend these limits.

Planzone Administrator

A Planzone Administrator is a user who has all permissions in a Planzone. He can edit the Planzone settings (name, logo) and manage all Planzone members. He can create projects and manage templates. He also has project management permissions in all projects within the Planzone.

A Planzone Owner is by default the only Administrator in the Planzone. However, especially in large organizations, it can be useful to have several Administrators; that is why it is possible for an Administrator to grant the Administrator role to another Planzone member.

Planzone Member

A Planzone Member is a user who has joined a Planzone by accepting an invitation from another Planzone member. A Planzone Member can be granted with the Administrator role by a Planzone Administrator.

Planzone Owner

The Planzone Owner is the user who has created a Planzone (via the sign-up form). He/she has sole rights to manage the Planzone subscription plan.

Planzone role

A Planzone role is a set of permissions that apply in a Planzone. A Planzone role is granted to a Planzone member.

The following roles are available (sorted by increasing permissions): Member, AdministratorandPlanzone Owner.

Planzone user (or « Planzoner »)

A Planzone user (or « Planzoner ») is a person who uses the Planzone Service.

A Planzoner is uniquely identified by his e-mail address. This address is used for login and notification.

A Planzoner can be a member in several Planzones but he has a unique profile that is common across all his Planzone memberships.

Project

A project is a way to organize work and share information between several users in order to reach a common objective. A project is defined inside a Planzone. It is managed by a Project Owner, and the users who participate in a project are called Project Team Members.

Project Owner

A Project Owner is the user in charge of a project. He always has Project management permissions and can edit all project information, including adding project team members. There can be only one Project Owner for a given project (at a given time).

Project permissions

Project permissions are granted to project team members. The following permissions are available (sorted by increasing permissions): « View only », « View and edit », « Project management ». The Project Owner always has Project management permissions. However this permission can be granted to other project team members, so that the responsibility can be shared.

Project team member

A project team member is a user who has been assigned to work on a project. This implies that he/she has been invited to the project's Planzone, and that he/she has been added to the project team by the Project Owner (or any team member with Project management permissions).

All project team members can view project data. A project team member's specific project permissions determine the type of data he/she can actually edit.

Resource

A resource is an entity that has a limited availability and needs to be assigned to activities in a project's schedule.

There are 2 kinds of resources in a Planzone: « staff » resources which are actually Planzone members, and « other » resources which can be material resources such as a company car, a training room or laptop computer. These other resources are defined and shared among all projects within a specific Planzone.

Shortcuts

These are icons at the bottom of the Planzone navigator that allow you to quickly perform a specific action from where ever you are in a Planzone. Currently you can send an e-mail to other Planzoners or create a to-do for one of your projects.

Tag

This is a keyword or reference that may be applied to a project document. One or more tags may be entered on a document detail page. Documents can then be searched by tags.

Template

A template defines a default project structure. It contains team members, activities, milestones, to-dos, documents and wiki pages. A template is defined in a Planzone. It can be used just in that Planzone or copied to a public list and shared with all Planzone Community members. Project templates were developed to save you time when you need to create different projects with similar structures.

Timesheet

Individual Timesheet:
The individual timesheet ("My timesheet") of every team member is a spreadsheet which displays the individual “time spent” working on a project or project activity. A team member can easily fill in the blanks with how much time he/she spent working on a certain project activity on a certain day. To share this information with the project manager one has just to click on “Validate” and the project manager sees on the “Project timesheet” the time spent of the team members. To discuss any issue, concerning the time spent or the remaining hours, either the project manager or the team member can start a discussion.

Project Timesheet:
The project timesheet is a spreadsheet, where the project manager can see the timesheets of all team members with their assigned and remaining hours for a project activity. After a team member has validated his/her time spent on an activity the project manager can integrate the time spent and at the same time keep track of the remaining hours. For any other issues, such as delays he/ she can start a discussion to talk about it.
Moreover a project manager can now see how much time it takes to finish an activity. So the next time someone else has to work on a similar activity the project manager can pre-establish the working hours of a team member. Thus, the project management data can make costs for human resources visible and allows thereby a better future budgeting.

To-do

A to-do is a task that has to be completed. It is always associated with a Planzone project. It can have a priority or due date and be assigned to one or more project team members. It can also be left unassigned, which means that it can be completed by any project team member.

Each project has a list of to-dos. To-dos can be organized by activities. To-do assignments across all projects are also listed by date and alphabetic order on a Planzoner's HomeMy to-dos page.and

Unavailability

This is a period where a Planzone member is not available for activity assignments. A member's unavailability must be set for each Planzone in which he/she is a member. These periods can be automatically set by selecting a holiday and work week calendar from the Unavailability view in the My assignments tab. Manual entries of unavailable periods can also be made here.

Virtual team member

A « virtual » team member is a project team member that is not actually a Planzone user. It can be created and used by a Project Manager as a placeholder before assigning a real team member. To-dos and activities can be assigned to virtual team members. Virtual team members can be replaced by real Planzone members at any time during the life of a project.

Wiki

A wiki is a collection of web pages (articles) that a Planzone member can browse and edit. These pages include text, images and links to allow internal and external navigation. It also possible to define a main page and a wiki menu.

There is a wiki space defined for each project.