The Redmine Guide » History » Revision 22
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# The Redmine Guide
Redmine is the most popular open-source project management tool. You'll find out about the common use cases, why people use Redmine, approaches to issue tracking and project management features.
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## What Is Redmine?
Redmine is primarily an issue tracker. Issues, also called tickets or tasks, are the atomic unit of Redmine.
An issue tracker is a to-do list on steroids. It’s focused on accountability and forward progress.
Redmine is also includes project management aspects. You can plan out milestones on Gantt charts. You can also use Agile project management techniques such as Scrum or Kanban.
## Who Makes Redmine?
Jean-Philippe Lang released the first version of Redmine in 2006. Since then, a community of open-source developers have expanded and improved upon Redmine.
Open source means you can download, use and re-write the source code. If you see something that is broken, you can contribute a fix or patch to solve the problem.
All of the developers at Planio have contributed to the Redmine core.
## Who Uses Redmine?
Hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide use Redmine.
### Open Source Projects
You’ll find that open source projects often use Redmine as a way to organize the project. The Ruby programming language is one very high profile project that uses Redmine.
### Universities
Redmine is a favourite for universities as a way of letting students and researchers organize their projects. Examples include X university, which organizes Z projects.
Redmine lets you make certain aspects of your projects public, while keeping others private, which is great for universities that want to involve the public in research projects.
### Startups
It’s very chaotic trying to start a business out of nothing. That’s why many startups use Redmine to organize their efforts. Redmine is a good choice because you can use it to handle software development and you can also handle incoming customer support tickets.
### Software Developers
Redmine is uniquely suited for software development. It’s highly integrated with git and svn. The wiki is often used to document software projects.
### Consultants
Redmine and email work well together, so you can include clients on projects. That improves how you work together.
## Why Do People Use Redmine?
### Get in Control
To-do lists get out of hand, and they’re hard to share with others. Issue tracking in Redmine brings teamwork to to-do lists. Redmine lets you have a powerful workflow for getting tasks done and reviewing work. You can discuss problems and find solutions with others.
### Keep Information in One Place
The wiki lets you create documentation for software, work practices and more. You can store important files in one place.
### Collaborate Through Discussion
You have an idea? The forums let you discuss it publically with your team members. You make announcements via the blog.
### Accessible from Anywhere
Redmine is accessible anywhere you have an internet connection.
## Issue Tracking
### The Elements of a Redmine Issue
Issues are the atomic element of any Redmine account. You need to create a project before you can create issues, because every issue is connected to one project.
For example, at Planio we have separate projects for English Support tickets and German support tickets. We also have projects for different areas such as marketing and the Planio website.
Let’s create a new issue:
### Updating Issues
As you progress through a task, you can update the issue with the latest status. You can also re-assign it to someone else and you can add notes with questions or ideas. You can also upload files as attachments.
 
### Creating Issues from Email
You’re walking around town, getting things done. You realize that you didn’t add the new office party as a task in Redmine.
No problem. You can quickly email your project dropbox with some details, and an issue will be automatically created in Redmine.
### The Issues List
You’ve created a bunch of issues, and you want to start to get an overview of the issues.
The issue list is your central hub for seeing the latest status in a project.
In the beginning, it will be easy to see all the issues on one page. However, as you start getting a LOT done with Redmine, the amount of issues will grow.
At Planio we have over a quarter of a million issues in our own Planio account. That’s a lot of issues!
Happily, Redmine comes with powerful ways to drill down into issues, so you can pull out only the relevant issues.
The options let you quickly pull out the information that is relevant to you.
### Custom Queries
You can save a particular filter for quick access in the future. For example, if you want to see all the new customer support issues that haven’t been assigned, you can save that as “New Customer Tickets” and you’ll be able to access it quickly in the sidebar.
## How do You Use Issues?
### Tasks
You have a task to get done? Create an issue and assign it yourself. Once you’ve done your part, you can assign the task to someone else for review or finishing.
**How to Use Redmine for tasks:**
You can the “Task” tracker, which is the default tracker. Trackers are just different types of issues. By default, Redmine comes with 3 different trackers. If you don’t know what you should choose, “Task” is good choice.
You can tell the person you’re assigning the task so information such as the priority (high, normal or low), and you can set a due date.
Setting a start date and a due date means you’ll be able to visualize the task on the Gantt chart. The person the task is assigned to will also get email updates if the task isn’t completed on time.
The category field lets you group similar tasks together, which can be handy for finding and reviewing later.
Finally, you can add the task to a particular sprint or milestone, which is a good idea if you want to use Redmine’s project management functions.
### Ideas
You have an idea? You can quickly store in Redmine as an issue. You just click on create an issue, give it a subject line and then describe your idea in the description.
Often, you’d like other people to get updates on the issue even if they aren’t assigned the issue. For example, you want them to hear about your amazing new idea.
Therefore, you can set them as “watchers” for that issue. They’ll get emails notifying them of any new updates on the issue.
### Bugs/Problems
Perhaps you’ve found a bug in web application. You could create an issue in the web app’s project and assign it to one of the developers. You can describe the bug, and perhaps include a screenshot as a file.
If you’re an advanced user, you might even consider creating custom fields for bug tracking. For example, you could have a custom field for the iOS or browser. That would let you quickly filter out all the bugs for a particular device or browser.
### Support Requests
You can set up Redmine, so that your users can email support@yourcompany.com and their email will show up as an issue in Redmine. This makes it easier to manage the responses.
You can also turn Redmine into a fully featured CRM & Helpdesk via plugins. At Planio, we use the CRM & Helpdesk plugin.
When the CRM & Helpdesk is activated, you’ll see extra fields in issues for the company and contact.
## Project Management with Redmine
Redmine offers much than just issue tracking. It also lets you track the progress of your projects, monitor how much time tasks are taking and visualize the end date.
There’s three different ways to track and manage projects in Redmine.
### The Roadmap
You can divide up your project into various milestones. You can then see how far along each chunk is. You can also dig down into which tasks are holding up reaching a particular milestone, and you can also see the time spent on the milestone.
### Gantt Chart
This will let you visualize the different aspects. An issue will only appear on the Gantt chart if you enter a start and finish date for that issue.
### Agile Project Management
This doesn’t come with Redmine core, but you can add it via plugins. A good example is Agile Plugin. We include this plugin by default at Planio. You can plan a sprint. The issues will then appear on a Kanban style board. You can drag-n-drop the issues around depending on their status.
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