Windows Phone Thoughts: Punchin' In -- Time Recording with Project Clock CE

Reporting
As mentioned above, Project Clock CE is meant to provide a time-recording module for people using a Pocket PC. Thus, the reporting capabilities in Project Clock CE are limited, leaving the majority of reporting capability to the desktop/server version. Project Clock CE does provide two reports however.


Figure 9: Reports available from the Tools/Reports menu.

CyberMatrix has provided the capability to selectively report on a range of dates, however there isn’t an ability to produce reports for a specific client, project, or all occurrences of a task.

The Summary Report (shown below) provides a single line per entry of each record between the selected dates. It shows the basic information about the entry, including the date, Client, Project, Task, and number of hours booked.


Figure 10: Project Clock CE’s Summary Report.


Figure 11: Project Clock CE’s Detail Report.

The Detail Report shows the full contents of each of the fields for each of the recorded entries. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any way to export these reports to a file for storage, nor to print them off.

Support
There is no online documentation or help provided with Project Clock CE, but CyberMatrix does provide a downloadable 11-page manual. Over half of the manual is devoted to purchasing options and the license agreement, but the remainder provides a good description of how to use the CE version of the product. There are a couple of instances where they talk about pressing a MENU button which had me a bit confused, though.

Throughout the development of this review, the people at CyberMatrix were very prompt (usually responding within an hour or so of my email) and very helpful. This is a very good sign for a piece of software so critical to these types of businesses.

Conclusions
As I mentioned at the top of this review, my focus here was on just the Pocket PC module, so I didn’t spend any time looking at the capabilities of the Desktop server versions of Project Clock. While the Pocket PC module gets the job done in terms of providing a mobile solution for recording time, it really needs to be used in conjunction with the entire suite, rather than as a standalone solution.

Don is an Associate Director of Systems Development and Project Management with Fujitsu Consulting. As a full-time consulting Project Manager/Systems Architect, he’s constantly looking for ways to get out of the drudgery of weekly timesheet submission and reconciliation.