Project management is becoming an increasingly important part
of the Sys Admin’s life. While Microsoft Project seems to be the
standard project management tool used in most environments that I have
worked in, it can sometimes be nice to have such tools web based so
that multiple users can share information. This is where tools such as Collabtive
come in. Collabtive is a web based project management tool
that supports everything that you need to plan out and complete your
projects.
These tools include milestones, time tracking, tasks and task
lists, all presented in a multi language environment.
Currently German, English and French are all supported.
The web interface itself is intuitive, functional and
attractive all at the same time. You can see for yourself
though at their online demo – Collabtive
online demo.
If after having tried the demo, you decide that this is the
right tool for you, then this guide should help you to implement
Collabtive on your own Ubuntu 7.10 server. This guide is
based on the base LAMP install that comes packaged with Ubuntu 7.10
server, but should work equally as well on any Ubuntu LAMP server.
The installation is fairly straight forward, so let’s begin.
Installation Steps
Obtain Collabtive and prepare for the installationIn this step, you will be creating the directory in which
Collabtive will be installed, obtaining the Collabtive code itself and
setting up permissions. Issue the following commands:
cd /var/www/
mkdir collabtive
cd collabtive/
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/collabtive/collabtive-055.zip
unzip collabtive0-4-5.zip
rm collabtive0-4-5.zip
chmod -R 757 templates_c/
chmod -R 757 files/
cd /conf/standard
chmod 757 config.php
Create the Collabtive database and database user
This step will help you to create a database for Collabtive inMySQL, as well as the user under which access will be granted. To enter
the MySQL environment, issue the root login request with this command:
mysql -uroot -p
You will now be prompted for your root MySQL password. After
entering it, issue the following commands to create your database and
the database user. Please note that you can change the username and
password to meet your needs.
create database collabtive;
grant all on collabtive.* to collabuser;
grant all on collabtive.* to collabuser@localhost;
set password for collabuser=password(’collabPW’);
set password for collabuser@localhost=password(’collabPW’);
exit
The web setup phase
http://Server IPaddress/collabtive/install.php
You should now be greeted with the first page of the web
setup. On this page, you can change your language to German, English or
French. You can also check to ensure that conditions for the
installation are ready to proceed (see the screen shot below) and enter
your database information. If you followed the guide above, then the
information that you will need is as follows:
Database host: localhost
Database name: collabtive
Database user: collabuser
Database password: collabPW
Step-1
If everything appears alright here, then you can click on
“continue” to move forward to step number 2. In this step, you will be
creating your admin user. It is fairly straight forward, simply enter
the username and password that you wish to use and click on continue.
See the image below for reference.
Step-2
You should now be greeted with a screen letting you know that
the installation was successful, as shown in this image.
Step-3
If you see anything other than message, then you may want to
retrace your steps and make sure that you did not miss something.
If you do see the above image though, you can now safely
remove the install.php file for security purposes by using the
following command:
Now, you may click on the “Login” link shown above to be taken to
the admin login. If all has gone well, then you should now be
prompted with a
login request (see the image below). This will the admin user that you
created in step #2 of the web installation.
Step-4
Enter your credentials and click on the “Login” button. You
should now be presented with the web interface for Collabtive and ready
to begin your first project. While I couldn’t find any documentation on
the usage of Collabtive, it is fairly straight forward, if you are
familiar with project management. If you should run into problems
though, they do have a forum that has a lot of good information in it.
The forums are located at – Collabtive Forums.
