Project Management Functionality...?

[liquidone]

I thinking of purchasing your product for a very specific and unusual reason, so I wanted to make sure it is possible to do what I need. I work for a company that does a lot of service and installation work, and we need a better way to keep track of the jobs as they progress. Keep track of changes, and make sure everybody is up to date. Also, we keep all the information about the job, so we can go back and reference it when needed. Our current method is not working very well, which has been to place all information, emails, documents, files, etc...in the customers public contact in Outlook. Im invisioning to have a forum that holds 2 sub forums, current jobs and closed jobs. Each job would itself be a subforum, being as there are so many topics of conversation needed to take place. When the job closes, ill move the forum over to closed...now some specific questions....
1. Is there a limit to how many forums you can have? ...I would need to start out with about 300 sub-forums in the closed jobs category... not just a restriction limit, but would performance limit me as well?
2. Since there are so many jobs there, is there a way to display the forums in alphebetical order automatically....

Any other input as to functionality that might help us would be helpful
Thanks,
Mike

[Wayne Luke]

1) Software wise, there is no realistic limit. However your hardware can impose technical limits. 300 forums would push it on some servers.

2) No real way to do this but you could probably have a plugin created at vBulletin.org that could do this.

I would like to add that we are currently testing an addon to vBulletin called "Project Tools". It is specifically designed to handle multiple different projects in much the same way you are talking about. Hopefully it will be available soon to the public. This would eliminate the need for a large variety of forums and give you more control over the individual aspects of the projects.

You can see Project Tools being used on this site here:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/project.php

And you can read about it in our online documentation at:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/pt_main

[liquidone]

Thanks for your reply!
The PM software seems really nice, let me know if you need a beta tester, lol
Also, does just having a forum there use extra resources, because this site is going to be all internal, and will have a maximum of maybe 20 people at a time, but usuallly only 4-5 at a time? The reason we need all those past jobs is because we get calls all the time for service calls, and need quick access to the information about it, including several word , excel documents, pdf, line drawings, cad files, etc....but most of the forums will lie unused until we get a call to do service on it.....

Having said that, is a fairly current dual opteron server with 2 gigs of ram going to be ok with this application?

[Wayne Luke]

For the most part you shouldn't have problems with that server. Just having a forum doesn't really consume resources. Its the usage of the forum and the server where issues come in.