Collaboration

One of the Tuleap objectives is to provide developers with efficient software development and project management tools. In addition, the Tuleap site should quickly become the favorite communication channel of all users as it is pivotal for the project teams and their community of users to communicate efficiently.

To this end, Tuleap offers a series of communication services that can be customized by the project team. These include the News service and the Web Forums.

News Service

The News service complements your mailing lists. This service allows you to publish pieces of news related to your project. Any event in the life of your project is a good candidate for a news release: new people in the team, new software release, information on related technologies and why not your wedding announcement or the birth of your sixth child ? . Do not keep your project concealed behind a veil. Make your project life public for the benefit of all employees and for your faithful community of users.

News publishing is very easy. Simply click on the “News” item in the Project Main menu and then on the “Submit” link in the News Service menu at the top of the page. From there type the title of the news and its text body. You can type URLs in the body. Tuleap will detect them and transform them into a hyperlink in the published version. You can also choose whether you want the news to be public this means visible on your Project Dashboard for all Tuleap users or private which means visible for your project members only.

Any Tuleap visitor can attach a follow-up comment to the news visible for her on your project page making each piece of news a potential forum of discussion [1]. In addition the Tuleap Team sees all the public news published by all Tuleap projects and can decide that a project news is worth publishing on the Tuleap front page. A big splash indeed!! When submitting a news, you can request a promotion for the Tuleap front page to the administrator.

Web Forums

This is the third form of communication offered by Tuleap. Web Forums are more or less equivalent to mailing list except that the message-posting takes place via a Web interface rather than email. Therefore you need to have a connection to the site to participate in the discussion because you can’t prepare your message off-line, as you can with an ML.

To access the Web Forums of a Tuleap project, click on the “Forums” item in the Project Main menu. When a Tuleap project is created, it is given three Web forums: Open Discussions, Help and Developers. These Forums and all others are open to all Tuleap users both for reading and posting unless you decide to make them private (see below). A user can also decide to monitor a Web Forum. Monitoring a Forum will cause Tuleap to automatically forward all the posted messages via e- mail thus avoiding repeated visits to the Forum Web page.

Project administrators can create other Forums on demand by using the Forum Administration module that can be accessed via the “Admin” link in the News Service menu. Administrators can follow the links on this page to Add Forum, Delete Message, and Update Forum Info/Status. The Update Forum Info/Status page lets administrators make forums public or private, edit the name and description of the forum, or even delete the forum.

[1]

Behind the scene, each piece of news is actually managed exactly like a Tuleap Web Forum.