open-sTeam is a collaboration platform that has a very generic design and allows custom programmability with little code. my goal is to use it as a basis for various small business applications, such as a task manager.

to implement a task manager we need:

• an interface to create new tasks ✓
• present tasks and state in a list ✓
• track hours ✓
• the ability to efficiently update hours. (edit hours in place in a task list without opening the task first) ✓
• track task status  ✓
• hide completed tasks
• create tasks by email 
• show comments on task view
• show task details in email
• track hours of subtasks ✓

the following features are already provided by sTeam:

• add comments ✓
• manually order tasks ✓
• move tasks around ✓
• set permissions for who can make changes or comments ✓ 
• send emails to add comments (each task has an email address) ✓
• track changes to attachments ✓
• view task list in email client (via imap) ✓

by implementing each task as a folder we also get

• adding attachments to tasks ✓
• create subtasks ✓

implementation was done on  http://societyserver.org/

in the meantime the project morphed into a distributed email based task manager.