Remus Information Management

A fundamental requirement for a Information Management is a powerful Task-Management. In the following I’ll show you the capabilities of Remus regarding task-management. I’ll cover the following topics:

1. Creating/Editing Tasks
2. Logging units of work to your tasks
3. Synchronization with Outlook or other remote repositories
4. Task-oriented Desktop-Integration
5. Reporting of Tasks and Logged Work

Creating and Editing Tasks

To create a new Task use the File -> New Wizard and browse to the Task-Element. After you have entered a name of the task and its location in your global structure a new editor will be opened. In this editor you can edit all the neccessary elements for a task. If you switch to the second tab (“Work-Log”) at the bottom of the editor you can enter new units of work.

If you have created a few tasks you’ll end up with something like the screenshot below

Just for explanation. This screenshots shows 4 categories: The two on top are only stored locally, the 3rd is synchronized with my local Microsoft Outlook instance and the category at the bottom is synchronized with my E-Mail provider, that means this two tasks are stored in the cloud and are accessible from everywhere.

As you can see the task-icons have some small decorators, which are indicating the status of a task: The green decorator (e.g. at element “Visit aunt Mary”) indicates that the task is completed, and the red decorator (e.g. at “Ask Jeff for RAM”) indicates that the due-date is in the past and the task is not completed yet.

You can have several overviews of created tasks. If you switch to calendar view (at the bottom of the navigation) you’ll see all your task in a weekly view, if they have a due date (see screenshot)

Another possibility to create an overview is the report of all tasks of a category. How to create reports see the section below. The following screenshot shows an overview of all Tasks that are located under my “Tasks-Demo” project.

Worklog

A nice feature of the task-type is the ability to log the time you have worked on a task. To create a new work-log entry switch to the second tab and use the plus-button. See the screenshot of a task with multiple units of work.

Synchronization of Tasks

You can synchronize your tasks in the same way you synchronize other information units. By default Remus supports the synchronization with Microsoft Outlook and every protocoll-based connector. For a detailed tutorial how to work with remote repositories, see the Wiki.

Desktop-Integration

Remus’ Desktop integration gives you two possibilites to bring your tasks to the desktop. To enable this two section go into your Desktop-Panel configuration (Extra -> Preferences -> Remus -> Desktop Integration) and drag the two templates (“Worklog” and “Tasks”) into your panel-configuration, see the screenshot below.

After you have applied the new configuration the desktop panel will show up with two new sections

1. This is a little overview of your tasks grouped by the due-date (Today, This week and Next week). Double click on an element to open the appended task. Tasks with a due-date in the past are marked with a red font-color
2. The work logger. After you have chosen a task you can start tracking the time you are working on that task (use the buttons at the bottom to start and stop tracking). The effective time will be saved within the tasks worklog.

Reporting

Remus comes with a complete Reporting & BS Tooling to create reports based on your local information pool. By default Remus ships a few report-templates. To create a new report use again the File -> New Menu and scroll down to Report. In this wizard you can choose a template or start with a blank report. For the task-reporting Remus provides currently three templates. After you have chosen a template you only have to specify some input parameters for the report and you’re done. Watch the screencast below to see how this works in detail.

Advanced Drag-and-Drop

To create new tasks you can user either the manual procedure via File->New->Task or if you want to create a Task from a Text from another application you can use the rule engine. By default there are already some rules installed if you want to create your own rule here is an example. The requirements are: If I copy a text to remus, I want to have a rule that creates a new Tasks in my private task folder, with me as asignee, priority is low and the due-date should be in one week. Ok see the screencast how this can be accomplished:

Conclusion

As you can see Remus has several features for managing your task. Especially the reporting features are very useful, it allows you to create individual representations of your tasks and you also can export them as PDF, Excel, Word, etc..