Inspectime: time is money, do inspect time!

Time tracking

Inspectime is a web application designed mainly for time tracking. It can beused by a whole company, a team, or just one person. It supports effective useof expensive human resources, which significantly contributes to a successthese days. The results of tracking the time your employees spend doing aparticular task may be useful either for invoicing or for a detailed analysisof the real costs. Thanks to these, future work can be optimised and workingmethods can be improved.
Despite being very useful sometimes, accurate time tracking is oftenunderestimated or, at least, suitable tools are not available. Reporting completed work in the standard way is not very exact (it is done at the end ofa day or week) and, in addition, it can be time-consuming and thereforeexpensive. Regarding our own experience with reporting what had been done, wehave decided to create our own solution that would be more effective.

Solution and choice of open source

Inspectime offers easy and accurate reporting of completed work onparticular projects, which can be divided up to single tasks. To ensureaccuracy, we recommend real-time reporting, as employees hardly ever rememberhow much time they spent doing a particular task, or even forget about some ofthe tasks, at the end of the day. Real-time reporting also significantly helpsto improve flexible management as it provides the managers with the status ofall the work currently being done.

We originally created the application for our own needs, as we intended tointegrate it with our company’s processes closely. Now we are offering theresult for free download under the GNU GPL open-source licence, which allowsanyone to use it on their own server, even for commercial use. In addition, itis possible to pay for technical support or rent the application. Inspectime isa project of Effectiva Solutions, s. r.o.

Key features

• can be used on your own server without paying any fees, including commercial use
• easy and accurate time tracking based on events
• live monitoring of current employees work
• efficient real-time reporting
• time management support using The Pomodoro Technique
• rights control based on roles
• suitable both for companies focused on projects and companies focused on products
• ready for integration with other applications
• lots of exports for further processing
• support of reporting for more independent companies
• a web application with the comfort of use of a desktop one (keyboard controls, AJAX)
• support of modern web browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

You can take a more detailed tour at the projects web page: www.inspectime?.com/en/tour, wherea demo video is available.

Technology

The application is written in Java. It can be used on Apache Tomcat webserver and one of the supported SQL databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle).The source code is available as a Maven project and has been developed in theNetbeans development environment. It is therefore possible to open and developit quickly (libraries not available in the central maven repository can befound in the project SVN).

The use of Google Web Toolkit technology together with Ext GWT by Sencha is aninteresting feature. This combination allows us to create web apps with acomfort of use on a very high level that can be compared to desktopapplications (keyboard controls, shortcuts, etc.). Database operations areprovided by the Ujorm framework.

Installation on your own server

If you want to use the application on your own server, we recommendfollowing these steps:

1. Make sure that the Java 6.0 runtime environment, the Apache Tomcat 6.0 application container and the MySQL 5.0+ (or PostgreSQL 8.3+) are installed on the target computer. Should an application be missing, install it now.
2. Create a new user inspectime with the same password in the database and create a new database scheme inspectime with all the rights needed for creating tables, reading, writing and deleting database lines.
3. Get a distribution of Inspectime (download the file inspectime-application-1.00.war from SourceForge) and put it into Tomcat's web application directory ($TOMCAT_HOME/webapps).
4. Now you can start Tomcat and log in to Inspectime at http://localhost:8080/inspectime-application-1.00/ as admin with the same password (this user's password can be changed in the administrative section and new users can be added right from the login screen).

At the first run, the following file is created:

It contains the application's default parameters. Things like databaseconnection can be set here.

Further information

If we have attracted your attention, you can get further information aboutInspectime at www.inspectime.com.

Useful Links

• quick intro video
• source code on the SourceForge
• test a demo application: “test@test.com” with password “test”