The Time Tracking plugin has been a long time coming since it was voted up months ago as one of the top two feature requests in a community forum poll.  The development kept going to the back burner because we didn’t want to simply “hack” something together that mimicked Cerb3’s approach.  Our past approaches were uninspired.  We had to take this feature request and turn it into something we we would use — enthusiastically — ourselves.  We never actually used the older implementations (it was created on contract to someone else’s spec).

A couple months ago I posted a preview of the Time Tracking “timer” functionality, but we ended up stalling out shortly after that point because we needed to think a lot about where time tracking meets billing and usability.  We also needed to design how time entries would link to organizations (for integration with SLA and billing) without adding extra hoops to workers who didn’t need to be concerned with anything more than responding to people who wrote in.

At this point, I’m really happy with the workflow we have in place for Time Tracking in Cerb4; it fits into the nature rhythm of reading and responding to messages.  Workers aren’t saddled with extraneous steps, and managers are able to bill clients for the workers’ time without having to micromanage each entry.

We’re hoping to get the Time Tracking plugin in the next update; which we’d like to have ready by the later half of the month (Oct 2008).  This plugin will likely belong to a set of advanced functionality that will be free to all paying On-Site and On-Demand users.

Below you can find a video preview I put together to demonstrate the Time Tracking plugin in action.  It includes an audio commentary where I explain our thought process behind the implementation.  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

-Jeff@WGM