Redmine

Hello,

I have some questions (and maybe features request) related to Redmine hierarchisation of projects.

I am testing Redmine in a perspective to deploy it as the main project and tasks helper of an NPO. I am very impressed by this tool : efficient, user friendly, complete and flexible. The version I am testing is Redmine-0.8.7 (2009-11-15).

In my perspective, administrators != managers != mainstream users. This leads to issues for which I didn't found answer in the manual. What I want (in my craziest dreams) is the following :

• Root projects are created by administrators; or any other kind of superman (easy).
• On each root projects, are defined (from the top) a set of managers (easy).
• Managers should have entire permissions about what occurs inside their project (easy).
• Managers should have permission to create and manage subprojects inside their own project. This seems not possible for the following reasons:
  1. The permission to create projects is global. This means I should gives a global overpermission to fix a local need. Ok I maybe I should do this: I completely trust my managers. But ...
  2. To simplify subprojects creations, they should inherit properties (categories, members, groups, etc.) from root project. But the only way to do this seems to be by the use of the «copy» feature; implanted since #1125 (see also #1556). This is not convenient: this «copy» feature seems accessible only to administrators. And maybe administrators should not be asked each time any manager want to create any project.
  3. Since my Managers have locally entire permissions on their project, they also locally manage other members which have others status. Logically, managers should have power to delegate locally all their rights. This seems possible for most usefull permissions using members roles ... but not the creation of subprojects.

Then I fall in the following dilemma:

• Should I overweaponize most of my users to permit them to have freedom to initiate projects ?
• Or should I deny their volunteering and abuse of the hierarchical way to create projects ?

To summarize, the most reasonable way I see, to architect hierarchical behavior of Redmine at two (or more) levels of projects, is to use local delegation via member roles. Unfortunately as far as concerned project creation, this permission seems global. Moreover, in case of a «delegation» point of view, the killer feature of «cloning a project» is reserved to administrators. Maybe it shouldn't.

What do you think about this ?
François