Introduction to Project Template


A Project Template is a pre-built reusable template of project settings that can be used to populate into a project. Many things can be configured in a project, such as 


  • The project-wide settings, for example, whether allowing members to see each other, whether allowing member user to add task, whether sending daily digest email for the project and whom to send to, and etc.
  • The default settings for Member users in the project, for example, a user's rate, whether allowing user to add offline time, whether allowing user to delete time, and etc.
  • Tasks in the project. 


If you have many projects to manage, it would be tedious to manually configure these for each such project. Here is when Project Template feature comes in handy. You can create a Project Template and set up the necessary configurations and save them as a template. When you create projects, you can simply associate a Project Template to the new project. Then the configurations in the Project Template will be populated into the new project created, and your new project is good to go with the desired configurations. 


One example, you want to set three important things for all your new projects -- (1) Do not allow users to each other's names in the project (2) Do not allow Member users to delete time in the project, and (3) Need to have a fixed group of tasks for each user in the project. You can then create a Project Template using the following illustrated steps --


Create a Project Template


Here are the steps on how to create a project template. 


  1. Go to "Manage" >> "Manage Templates".
  2. Click "Create New Task Template" button to bring up the wizard for creating a new project template. 
  3. The first page is the introduction of project template. You can briefly read it or skip it by clicking "Next >>" button. 
  4. On "Project Preferences" tab, set the default preferences for project. Click "Next>>" to go to the next step. 
  5. On "User Settings" tab, set the default settings for Member users in project. Click "Next>>" to go to the next step. 
  6. On "Tasks" tab, create the default tasks you want to have in project. For each task, you can also set the options such as whether to automatically assign the task to new users in project, and whether to make the task an Always-Active task. These options will be associated with the tasks when they are populated into a new project. 
  7. Once all the settings are done, you can click button "Save As Template" to save this project template. There will be a dialog box that allows you to give a name to the project template. Just enter a name you like and click "Save" button. 
  8. Then you will see the new project template showing up in the list. You can edit it, delete it, or create a new project using the created project template. 




Create a Project using a Project Template

 

If you have a project template, when you create a project, you can select a project template for the project to be created. Once the new project is created, the settings in the project template will be populated into the new project. 




Default User Settings in a Project


After default User Settings are populated from a project template to a newly created project, you can find the default User Settings by selecting Users tab in the project. 



You are free to modify the default User Settings as you like. Please note that now the default User Settings are disassociated with those in the project template. Any modification to the default User Settings in a project will only affect the current project but no the project template they came from. In general, once the settings in a project template have been populated into a newly created project, the project and the project template have been disassociated. Any modifications in the project will not affect the project template and vice versa.