Who would have thought that the world would be so hard hit by another pandemic that it would change the entire project management paradigm? Many businesses across the globe had to shift their focus from growth to survival, and it called for effective tools to manage projects in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Even those who have prospered over this time are aware of the risks and need reliable tools to support their businesses.
Here we’ll unfold the best practices you can adopt to manage your Redmine to improve its efficiency, cut costs and extract the maximum benefit out of your project management system.
To get an unbiased opinion on the latest Redmine trends and strategies, and to understand the actual market needs, we interviewed the CTO of Safebridge, Stephanos Constantinou.
Reasons Why People Use Redmine
Redmine itself is a free tool which is one of the major reasons why many businesses use it. Another important reason is that it’s open-source which offers incredible flexibility. This is important if you need something more than the standard functionality offered by typical project management platforms provided “as is.”
Also, Redmine offers a big set of features and integrations that might turn your project management platform into an all-side workstation.
Issues Connected with Redmine
On the other hand, maintaining Redmine is not easy and even “simple” updates should be maintained by a professional, which requires a significant amount of money and effort.
This caused a trend of migration from Redmine to the cloud and an increased use of platforms such as RedmineUP to simplify the maintenance process and eliminate risks.
Another issue that many users report is that it has a very poor interface, a difficult learning curve and a slower speed compared to other solutions, which is no surprise for a free solution. It may sound minor, but project management app’s UX is what influences the productivity of the whole team. Lower productivity means you lose money.
Also, it lacks certain features that are present in more contemporary software.
“One of the biggest issues that we were having was, we were unable to track quality parameters, velocity being the first. Also, we have always wanted a tool equipped with an easy-to-use Kanban board, better backlog management, and the ability to track milestones with graphical plotting.”
Stephanos Constantinou
How Do People Solve These Issues? The Major Trend
The breakthrough in solving most of the issues while reaping all the benefits is the possibility of migrating your Redmine to the cloud.
Provided by third-party vendors, cloud-hosting solutions help you to:
- Easily install and update your Redmine;
- Improve its speed;
- Significantly improve the security;
- Get technical support that is not available for regular Redmine;
- Quickly improve the interface with themes and plugins of your choice.
All this is usually at a very reasonable price, especially when compared to the cost of hiring a professional to maintain your Redmine or even paying a freelancer for periodic tasks. If you add up the costs that you won’t lose because of the UX and security issues, the benefits of a cloud-hosting solution become obvious.
“We are moving all our internal infrastructure to the cloud. We want to have a solid infrastructure, less administration of the software setup, backups, always up to date SaaS, less expenses.” Stephanos Constantinou
How to Improve Your Redmine Experience in 2021
And now that we know how to improve the basic performance of your Redmine with cloud technologies, let’s check what the latest trends and best practices in 2021 are that you can implement to boost your Redmine and its efficiency even more.
1. Plugin Management & Upgrades
Plugins are an integral part of your Redmine experience if you want to implement some customization. And most likely, you will.
Typically with Redmine, it’s not easy to install and upgrade plugins. As mentioned before, you need to have a dedicated specialist to maintain the project management platform, which is an extra expense. If there’s nobody in-house who specialises in Redmine and knows all its nuances, it will be an inconvenience for your team to install and upgrade plugins every time.
When using a good cloud-hosting service, you don’t need to worry about this. There may be different conditions depending on specific platforms, but with RedmineUP, the DevOps will do the job for you. This will save you both time and money.
2. Data Protection and Privacy
One of the underlying tenets of a trustworthy and efficient software management application is the safekeeping of information. Choose a cloud-hosting platform that uses up-to-date TLS/SSL data-encryption protocols which prevent potential intruders from eavesdropping on certain connection routes.
With Pro hosting like RedmineUP, you will work according to the security management standard (ISO/IEC 27001:2013). You will use a GDPR-ready platform, fully compliant with all European and U.S. data protection laws.
3. Active Directory LDAP Authentication
One of the most important aspects of project management is authentication and access permissions.
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a software protocol employed to ensure centralized authentication to access certain modules of the project on every level.
It’s not integrated into Redmine by default, but RedmineUP comes together with LDAP which makes it easier for the CTOs and CIOs to store and retrieve access credentials and to manage single sign-on for accessing LDAP databases.
The downside of free Redmine is that it doesn’t come with an integrated Azure Active Directory. The cloud-based RedmineUP has SAML integrated, and you can set up Azure AD as a user directory through a simple step-by-step approach.
4. Auto-updated Redmine
Like other project management software, Redmine requires regular upgrades during the year. For example, the most recent version is Redmine 4.2. It is also necessary to update all the plugins simultaneously with the version upgrade.
You don’t need a dedicated DevOps guy to take care of seamlessly deploying the updates and setting up triggers if your cloud hosting can take care of it. With RedmineUp cloud hosting, this can all be done seamlessly at your request.
5. Decreased Downtime
For SaaS product owners, a downtime of even as little as 5% is not bearable. While updating your non-cloud Redmine in a regular way, you may get hours of downtime due to different reasons, such as the necessity to additionally update your Ruby-on-Rails or due to conflict of versions between software.
At RedmineUP, a cloud-based infrastructure, we take pride in offering 99.8% uptime by also providing a legally binded guarantee in the form of an SLA. RedmineUP allocates a dedicated customer success manager to each of its cloud accounts and the core responsibility of that manager is to make sure that the connections are up.
6. Cost-Efficient Business Model
Using Redmine with a cloud-hosting service can be very cost-efficient since you pay as you go. Instead of worrying about managing on-premises servers, you just have to sign-up and pay for the services you want.
You get all the benefits, such as regular updates, additional modules and integrations, and plugin installation, for a very reasonable monthly fee.
Obviously, $69–$299 per month (using RedmineUp as an example) is definitely less than you would pay for your own servers and DevOps work.
7. Customer Support 24/7 from Experts
Unexpected things occur and sometimes they happen at night or on weekends. If something is down, you can’t always wait until Monday or spend hours of your time searching for a solution.
With the 24/7 support offered by RedmineUp, you can be sure that your issues will be taken care of in a matter of hours.
“As a CTO, I am always looking out for tools that can help me manage the projects in an efficient manner without having to cost the business, huge amounts in return. After doing some research, I came across RedmineUP and after getting to know about the cool UI, exceptional DevOps services and economical service charges, we went for it right away.
Some really cool features including retrospectives management, time & expense tracking, requirements management, and ease of adding collaboration tools, really outstand RedmineUP and that became the reason for trying it for the first time.
Convenience, support from RedmineUP team, features, custom plans — that is what made me feel certain it was the right choice.” CTO of Safebridge, Stephanos Constantinou.
Looking at the value for money as well as security requirements, we see a RedmineUP Cloud hosting as “go for it.”
Wrap-Up
Using cloud-hosting services for Redmine has been a stable trend for the last few years. It helps you obtain both the great benefits of the flexible open-source Redmine platform and eliminate its downsides, such as poor security, low usability and high maintenance costs.
RedmineUp also offers additional features and customization options, takes care of all of your plugins and updates, and provides expert 24/7 customer service to ensure your project management platform works in the most efficient way.
