About
We are finally building what everyone has been waiting for: a fully open-source project management system with the appearance and functionality of an enterprise-level product. We call it Zookeeper, a virtual portal that manages your company, startup, or freelance work.
We have always had the need for an effective project management tool. As many teams find out through experience, people may frequently run into the pitfalls of trying expensive or bloated software that was either too limited in features or too difficult to use and manage for larger team efforts. We wanted to simplify what we were using and cater it to our specific needs, and we believe every team deserves a similar alternative. Zookeeper will be the ideal alternative software that has the potential to grow in both feature functionality and third-party integration.
There are just as many open-source project management platforms on the market as there are enterprise-level platforms. However, each have their own flaws. Let’s take a look.
- Functionality: A project management tool should enhance, not hinder development. Therefore, it must contain the necessary functionalities in an easy-to-use and intuitive platform.
- Ownability: You must be able to own your own data! It is your sensitive data; why should it be in the hands of another company?
- Extensibility: The tool should be completely free, open-source, and easily extendible. It must be able to be extended and used with other platforms that are complementary to a project management system. Building with extensibility in mind facilitates improvements and technological adaptations.
- Adaptability: The platform must be adoptable by other currently used systems. This means it must have a standardized API available that could be integrated within other third-party applications. It should not cost money to adopt!
- Customizability: It must be fully customizable to fit the needs of any user type, whether through theming or modularizing functionality.
- Usability: It must be visually appealing, self-explanatory and user-friendly. It must also be accessible and responsive to use on all devices, such as mobile, tablet, and of course desktop.
Let’s summarize our principles:
Organize The Life Of a Project Into Milestones / Sprints
The main built-in feature is the project management system. Organize your projects based on your development life cycle standards. You can divide your projects into sprints/milestones, allow ticket creation on projects, and define time estimation and budget on individual sprints/milestones.
Manage and organize your clients by creating an organization record. Each member can view updates for their organization.
- Assign domains to a company
- User auto-detect. Automatically place members within organizations based on their email domain, including existing members
- Assign projects to a company
- Assign tickets to a company
- Attach files for a specific company
- And more!
Zookeeper comes with an out-of-the-box ticketing system which may be used for internal and external projects with built-in and custom access levels. View and manage your tickets in a centralized place.
- Supports custom status and priority levels, user assignments, custom department assignments, due dates, project assignments and more.
- Each ticket can contain multiple file attachments. Files are securely saved in your internal hosting.
- Search and filter tickets by any built-in or custom added fields.
- CC external emails on specific ticket replies or file attachments.
- Transfer assigned tickets to different users and departments. POP3 ticket downloader. Create tickets by email.
- Assign different emails to create automatic tickets for different departments.
- And more!
You can create and modify tickets by replying directly through email, which will automatically update to Zookeeper without the need to sign in. This feature has been supported by other products such as Basecamp, but now you can have it fully open-source!
Members may record the amount of time spent working on a ticket or task in our built-in time tracking system. Admins and managers have access to these timesheets and can import this information to their accounting software. Integration with Quickbooks and other third-party accounting software are part of our master plan.
- Allocate hours to projects
- Charge time against tickets
- Charge time against tasks
- View timesheets and time reports.
- And more!
Daily recaps and global reports are available to users with proper access levels.
- View ticket allocation by departments
- View user activity in a timeline format
- View global ticket status and organization activities
- Filter user and ticket reports by all available fields
- And more!
Manage users, user roles, and permissions within those roles. You can define new roles and new permission sets.
- User registration
- Private messages
- Create user roles
- Built-in permission sets
- Custom permission sets
- Assign permission sets to user roles
- And more!
We understand that authentication may be difficult when you are logging in with multiple platforms. To simplify the process, Zookeeper not only supports local users, but can be integrated with LDAP, Active Directory, Facebook, custom JSON, and even supports single sign-on (SSO).
- Local user inventory
- LDAP integration
- Active Directory integration
- Facebook login integration
- Custom JSON integration
- Single Sign On support
Zookeeper comes with a built-in Knowledge Base (KB) system, which allows you to organize your documentation by categorizing articles and searching through them faster.
- Create articles
- Create article categories
- Assign articles to categories
- Attach files to articles
- Publish and unpublish articles
- Allow anonymous users to access certain articles
- And more!
The portal works perfectly on desktops, tablets and mobile phones. We are planning on releasing Zookeeper with one default theme that is fully responsive on mobile and tablet, but you will also be able to build your own themes. All aspects of theme building will be explained in our documentation.
The user will also be able to customize and build their own themes for Zookeeper. Our documentation will explain all aspects of theme building. Future themes are also in our agenda.
Our REST API library will allow you to integrate third-party applications with Zookeeper. You can create individual API keys that are each associated with a single integration. We will release a complete API documentation upon the project release.
Language support is integrated into the initial release. We have created a language file that defines all of the words used in Zookeeper and created a flexible method of adding new languages. You can add your desired language by entering the translation for each word. We are planning on sending all the new language files that we receive from users and our own team.
Last but not least, Zookeeper support for extending the application is through our plugins. You can create plugins and modify the existing ones. We have made an extensive list of core functions that will be available from the plugin directory. We will release a complete Plugin documentation upon the project release.
In a nutshell, Zookeeper has been built in PHP, javascript, HTML and MySQL. It will be installed on a single server and will be compatible will all major web servers. If you have any technical questions, please do not hesitate to ask us.
We have done most of the work; why do we need Kickstarter? Great question! First and foremost, we need your support to build a solid community of users and developers to improve and contribute to the project so that everyone can benefit from it. Secondly, we need some initial funding to cover the server cost, purchasing open-source license of some of the components we have used (such as Redactor editor) and hire additional team members to help us complete the testing and documentation. Kickstarter will help us build an open-source application that can be hosted on your own servers, customized to your needs, and supported by a open-source community.
Our campaign budget goal is calculated and depicted below:
For our stretch goal, we will let you decide which functionalities you would like us to develop. Here is a list of features that we thought are great additions to the Zookeeper:
- Developing Android and iOS apps.
- Building integration plugin for major accounting software, such as Quickbooks.
- Build integrations for complimentary Atlassian products, such as Bitbucket, HipChat, Confluence.
- Build integrations for all Git platforms, supporting Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Integrate Zookeeper with enterprise file management system, such as Box or Dropbox.
We are open to ideas and would love to hear your feedback!
Vampeo consists of a group of young technical people who are passionate about the work they do. We are problem solvers more than anything else and software is a tool in the toolbox. We believe that ideas have to be originated by a problem, and the solution construction is the most crucial step of the project.
Zookeeper is an outcome of what we initially started as a side project to solve our internal project management and ticketing problems. It is now a solution that we use ourselves to deal with everyday management and organization bloat. Zookeeper helps us focus on what matters and obliterate the organizational nonsense.
Risks and challenges
There is always room for error. We have calculated as accurately as we possibly could to eliminate these risks and challenges, however, we have still identified these potential issues:
* Lack of community feedback. The more feedback we receive, the faster and cleaner we can complete this project.
* Keeping structure simple while introducing more functionality. Developing more functionalities in case of stretched funding will have to be calculated to eliminate unnecessary complexity.
* Maintaining a clean codebase and keeping technical debt low. Our code refactoring stage is crucial for a successful delivery. We need to carefully cleanup and comment our code so everyone can understand.
To minimize these risks, we are planning on updating our campaign page throughout the process to keep the community up-to-date.
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Funding period
- (58 days)