Opus is a workforce management application for small teams.
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We designed Opus as a lightweight team management platform to provide small teams with the facilites to collaborate and connect with their fellow teammates. While there's no limit to how many people can be added to an Opus team, we feel that our services are best fitted to teams of less than 75 people.
When a user joins Opus, they will not be part of any teams. To access the tools on the site, they will need to either receive an invite from a user in a team that already exists, create their own team, or join an existing one. Once they are a member of a team, they will enter the team at the lowest permission level and can interact with the team features as usual. Teams in Opus have two tiers: a main team, and subgroups of that team. Subgroups can be used to divide up the team into specialized sections, perhaps by department, instrument, or position, based on the purpose of the team.
Widgets are available for each of the tools that Opus provides. Each widget provides a snapshot of the tool for the user by displaying three recent items in list form.
- On the user's dashboard: Widgets are displayed for Announcements, Calendar, Contacts, and Teams. Each one of these widgets links to its corresponding feature; in addition, the Teams widget also has individual links to the pages for each of the teams that it displays.
- On a team's page: Like the user dashboard, widgets are displayed for each of the current features. However, when viewing widgets on an individual team's page, the widget will only show data for that specific team. Additionally, the widgets will link to the corresponding feature, but the data that is shown will automatically be filtered by the team that the user navigated from. For instance, if a user clicks on the Announcements widget from the 'Basketball' team page, they will be redirected to the route '/announcements/Basketball', which will initially be filtered to show all announcements for the 'Basketball' team.
Below is a list of tools and features that we've implemented as of May 2021. Announcements, Calendar, and Contacts pages all display their corresponding data in a table view, using the NPM package 'react-bootstrap-table-next'. This allows each of them to be sorted by any column the user chooses.
Users within a team can create an announcement that all other users in that team can view. Each announcements is displayed in a table view with its priority (High, Medium, Low), the user that created it, the team it was created for, the expiration date of the announcement, its associated event (if it has one), and the announcement message. Announcements can be filtered by team and priority using the corresponding dropdown menu or by accessing the announcements route paired with the desired team: '/announcements/{teamName}'. Announcements have an expiration date, and will be deleted automatically after that date has passed.
Users can create events that are associated with their team, which are then visibile to all members of that team. Alternatively, users can create events that are between them and any of their contacts, without being linked to a specific team. In this case, the event is only visible to people who were invited. The events table can be filtered by team and can also display all events without a corresponding team.
Contacts simply displays all of the users that the current user shares at least one team with. Like all of the tables, it is sortable, and the username of each row in the contact table links to the profile page of that specific person.
Users can create new teams by navigating to their teams page and clicking 'Create Team'. This will prompt the user for a name, and will create the new team and add it to the user's teams once they submit. On each team's specific page, users can invite new members to the team or remove members who are already in the team, and the 'Members' widget reflects these changes. Additionally, users can create and delete subgroups within the team, which are displayed in the 'Groups' widget. Currently, no functionality exists for these subgroups, but we have plans to create unique pages and permissions for each of them in a manner analagous to the teams.
Time constraints, testing, and documentation have limited the nunmber of features we could implement before the end of the year. The following section includes proposed enhancements to Opus that could be taken on by future developers.
Many messaging platforms already exist, but it would be a bonus to include a chat system within the Opus app where users could stay in touch with contacts from the various teams that they are a part of. We would also like to implement a group chat feature so that users could have a running conversation with their entire team or subgroup, depending on the team's needs.
While we had planned to include this in the MVP, time constraints and backend configurations required us to move this feature to after MVP. We plan to implement this on the backend with three lists for each team, each containing the ids of the corresponding users: 'owners', 'managers', and 'users'. Owners have full access to the site's features including editing a team name, promoting members up to owner, and deleting the team that they are the owner of. Managers can create team-wide events and announcements, remove and add users to the team, create new subgroups, and promote members up to manager. Users will have the ability to leave teams, create events between themselves and other users, and view announcements and events of their corresponding team. Each permission level inherits the permissions of the levels below it. These lists can then be fetched from the API to determine what level of access the current user is allowed on the site.
Users would be able to add or remove 'To-Do' items that can be assigned to other members of their teams, the entire team, or themselves. Users could then view their assigned to-dos or team to-dos in a manner similar to Announcements, and then could mark items as 'To-Do', 'In Progress', or 'Completed', and so on.