GPR
Online Research Project Management
Online Research Project Management
GPR is the Research Project Manager developed by the Universitat de Barcelona. It is an online Project Management solution that was originally developed to help the researchers and managers from this University to organize all of their project related work and provides them with a project-centered space to share and collaborate and a set of related productivity tools.
It is already helping hundreds of researchers and managers from our University to manage their projects.
Throughout the development process one of the main design criteria was to create a modular tool that could also be adapted to other different environments. Because of that, GPR is quite modular and extensible. We, internally, kind of consider it more like a platform on top of which you can deploy modules that implement all the different functionalities. In fact, you actually build your own personalized GPR installation by connecting a custom set of these modules but, more on that later under the Extensibility Section.
These are some of the most relevant GPR features:
GPR is an online tool for managing projects though their life-cycles. GPR was originally designed to manage Research Projects but there is no reason why it should not be able to deal with other types of projects as well (Healthcare, Architecture, Engineering, ... are straightforward Examples that come to our mind).
GPR gives the projects a central online Meeting Point where all the team members can go to find the always up-to-date relevant information and tools.
Right from the start phase when it can help you with the planning (Workpackages, Tasks, Deliverables,...), through all of the project life (monitoring, scheduling, documents, Templates, messages and tons of other Features) until the end of it.
It is also worthy to note that GPR can be made to manage the whole life-cycle of the projects or it can be made to connect to already existing external project repositories that do it.
GPR was originally designed to work with University Research Projects so Research Projects are actually our main area of expertise.
We are currently managing thousands of Research Projects. Most of these are small research projects (one to three participants), but we also manage big European Projects with big budgets and tens of participants from all over Europe.
It is really easy to see why, when dealing with these big multinational projects, is where GPR really shines.
Formal Planning, being able to share resources, having a central place online to control and where everybody from multiple countries can gather eases a lot the collaboration efforts needed to accomplish the project goals. Besides that, GPR helps you throughout the whole project and is already prepared to automate some of the most tedious overheads these european projects entail like, for example, automatic generation of Excel Timesheets in standard european formats already prepared to be delivered.
All Application accesses are thoroughly validated by GPR.
GPR sports a flexible user access rights definition system based on Profiles and Roles:
GPR lets you customize your Home Screen by letting you add and rearrange Widgets. These Widgets present information and let you quickly perform actions.
There are multiple Widgets to choose from, including:
Plus there is a dedicated API and module system that allows programmers and consultors to easily create new modules.
GPR is able to keep in contact with you by sending you emails and notifications whenever relevant events occur, for example:
Inside GRP we offer a centralized screen where you can configure all of your notifications for all the different Modules. There you can configure the frequency and types of messages you will receive for each project or in general.
GPR helps you with the Accountancy of you Project before and after it starts:
Before it starts, GPR allows you to plan your budget through time, allowing you to decompose it through the years and concepts. This information will always stay accessible and will be used as a reference.
After your project starts, GPR allows the team members that are given the relevant permissions (like the Principal Investigator or the managers) to have realtime access to the actual accountability data.
GPR connects with the Economic System, retrieves the most revelvant economic information and formats it as an easy to understand summary with graphs and pie charts. Besides that, it also presents a lower level screen where it lists the actual economic transactions and their relations.
GPR currently is designed to connect to SAP to gather this economic data, but other similar economic systems should also be easily integrated.
You can use GPR to store the time you dedicate to the different Tasks and Workpackages. If you do so, besides being able to monitor the project progress with GPR, it will automatically be able to generate Excel timeseets with all your data. Templates for different standard European Projects formats already exist, plus you yourself or your consultor can also write other Excel Template Sheets that will allow you to generate other personalized Excel outputs.
GPR gives the participants of a project a common secure repository to upload and share documents.
Documents are stored on the server. This allows the project participants to download your files from any machine that has Web access. And they are periodically backed up by technical personnel. One less thing to worry about.
Currently we use Alfresco as the underlying Content Management System but integration with other tools may also be possible.
GPR includes a document generation system based on our own Template engine. You can define an Open Office document structure containing references to entity properties and lists using an easy syntax and then GPR is able to generate documents in the following Formats:
GPR includes a form definition language that allows you to define dynamic entity attributes.
Forms are defined using documents writen in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that also allow the definition of both constraints and validations. GPR takes then care of maintaining the newly created data properties and generating their presentation/edition/printing User Interfaces so they are completely abstract and do perfectly integrate with the look and feel of GPR, even if it does change.
GPR project Wall is a Facebook-like Wall that allows you to post news about your project and other team members can comment on them. And just like with any other notifications in GPR you can subscribe to them and receive the updates as emails.
GPR allows you to create and host very simple Web Pages for you or your projects just by checking a few checkboxes to select which components you want to appear in them.
If you want to, you can also add more content or upload images to them by using the provided Rich Text Editor.
Generated Web pages are multilingual, responsive, easily accessed from mobile devices and easily indexable by Google.
GPR currently supports three languages (English is one of them) but translating to any other language is extremely easy. You just need to translate a plain text File that contains all of the language-dependent tags.
GPR is also 100% Unicode so it is able to deal with exotic character sets. Be sure to check out the attached screenshot that shows GPR working in Chinese as an example (automatic translation thanks to Google Translate).
We used a set of State of the Art standard technologies to develop this product including:
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Other names of actual companies and products mentioned on the GPR website may be the trademarks of their respective owners and reference to them does not suggest sponsorship, endorsement or association with GPR. Nothing contained on the GPR website should be construed as granting, by implication or otherwise, any license or right to use any Marks displayed on the GPR website. You are not permitted to use any Marks displayed on the website, metatags or any other "hidden text" utilizing Marks without prior written permission of such third party who may own the Mark.
To ease the customization process we designed GPR as a set of core functionalities and a set of modules that use them.
Depending on the actually installed modules the application does have more and less functionalites. These modules can also be customized and new ones can also be created so you can add new functionalities to GPR.
A module is just a Java library written against the documented GPR API we generate which takes us to our next Section: GPR as a Platform.
We envision GPR as a Platform. We offer:
Plus all of the project, user, document, etc... management functionalities already provided by GPR. This makes GPR a great Platform to build your Project oriented application upon.
Why start developing from scratch?
These are some videos showing GPR in action.
We created them as help aid for the application. They are in Catalan and quite old but they might give you a bit of insight as to how the application actually looks like.
We think GPR is a nice online project management application and suspect its Platform could also be useful in other contexts so we are open to suggestions.
Whether you've got an idea, done something noteworthy, think we should change something, have something to show us, want to ask a question or tell us something about GPR, this is the place.
Just send us an email to the following address: suportgpr@ub.edu
We are happy to hear from you.