[dev] Hermes enhancement

[Manilal Krishnapillai]

Hello all,
    We are an software outsourcing firm located in India, primarily  
working for a US based company(Ascella Technologies). Both the  
companies are using Horde application suite and a dozen of other  
Free/Open Source Software for more than 5 years. We have successfully  
implemented Horde Framework to deploy webmail(imp, mimp), address  
book(turba), Bookmarks (trean), Inventory(sesha), Calendar(kronolith),  
File Manager(gollem) and Tickets(Whups) for the internal purpose of  
the company. We also participate in community mailing lists, forums   
and IRC of various Open Source Projects.

    We have recently started using Hermes for tracking the timesheets  
of employees and contractors. The application seems to be stable and  
simple. But it lack some of the features that we may require for legal  
reasons. We have made a close analysis of the existing application and  
finally came up with some enhancements. Basically our aim is to add  
features so that the application will completely conform with  
DCAA(Defense Contract Audit Agency) guidelines without losing any of  
the existing functionality/feature. We can engage a couple of  
qualified developers to continue the development of hermes to make it  
enterprise ready. It may be nice if commit access is provided to our  
developers, so that we can develop and collaborate effectively.  
However all the minute details will be communicated to this mailing  
list, and thus community collaboration is assured.

The following are the drawbacks of the existing application:
  1. The current system is designed for personal use rather than for  
an enterprise
  2. There is no audit trail of the actions carried out in Hermes.
  3. It lacks a review and approve/reject mechanism for timesheets(timeslices).
  4. Deliverables(Project heads) cannot have billable/non-billable  
mode - only timeslices can be made billable/non-billable

Here are the features that we plan to add to Hermes:
The application should primarily implement the requirements outlined  
in DCAA guidelines published by US government for federal clients. In  
addition the following features may also be implemented.
    1. Audit Trail - The application should have a solid auditing  
mechanism, through which all the activities in the system is traced.
    2. Approval mechanism - An approval/rejection mechanism may be  
implemented, through which the employee timesheets are monitored and  
approved/rejected by Admins/Managers.
    3. When approving a timeslice the Manager should be able to post  
an optional note about the timesheet.
    4. When rejecting a timeslice, the Manager must be required to  
provide a note briefing the reason for rejection. The timeslice  
rejection may be notified to the concerned employee through email.
    5. The original timeslices are not editable. they can only be  
marked as edited. This will ensure the audit trail of time slices.
    6. It should be possible to make deliverables  
billable/non-billable. In the current system, the timeslices can be  
made billable/non-billable which is not desirable.(Feature from Horde  
bug tracker: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=5207)
    7. Pre-defined reports based on projects, users and dates.
    8. Ability to define Payment Periods for each employee.
    9. Corrections will be handled by showing debit/credit entries  
(negative entries for the mistake and positive for the correction)

This is not a complete list and I am not sure whether some one is  
working on any of these features. If there are people working on the  
above features, then we are ready to provide inputs and participate in  
the development. Kindly let us know if there are people who are  
interested in implementing the features, so that we can collaborate  
and create a new enterprise grade timesheet tracking system.


regards
Manilal K M.
Systems Manager,
Ejyothi Services,
Kochi, India - 682015.