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iTea
We are using and developing our own project management system, the iTea Portal, for handling, organizing, collecting, delivering, distributing, archiving, and managing the translation jobs over Internet.
Primary goal of the iTea – Internet Translations – portal system for management of translation jobs over Internet is to enable easy, platform and place independent cooperation of a multilingual group of translators over a computer network.
Ergonomic design of the system was made on the basis of day-to-day business experience when managing translation jobs. The design has never been focused on the perspective of a book-keeping software, but rather on the experience of translation project managers and translators in the first place.
The iTea portal helps you from the initial project phase to the financial end. During the whole life cycle of a project different people need to access and add/modify project data, files, and documents.
Take a look at some screens from the live system which may give you a better idea how it works.
Introduction
Primary goal of the iTea – Internet Translations – portal system for management of translation jobs over Internet is to enable easy, platform and place independent cooperation of a multilingual group of translators over a computer network. The system is not designed for online translations, but rather for management, distribution of work, collection of ready translations, accounting, archiving all projects and files, searching, and delivery of translation jobs to clients, while the translations themselves are done locally in any software required.
The iTea portal system has a history going back to the beginning of this century. It has been developed since 2001 and tested in productive operation of a day-to-day translation agency business since 2005. The design has been made for a Firebird database with communication layer written in Java. The complete system has been employed in a productive environment since 2006, running, working and helping us ever since.
Get organized with the finest blend of iTea features
Ease of use
Ergonomic design of the system was made on the basis of day-to-day business experience when managing translation jobs. The design has never been focused on the perspective of a book-keeping software, but rather on the experience of translation project managers and translators in the first place. Even if the system supports all necessary financial operations, creation of invoices etc. the core concern is to enable project managers and translators get their work organized in an easy and effective manner. No extra skills or tools are necessary. Once you have a computer, Internet access, and a web browser – you can go ahead.
Total accessibility
This was one of the basic requirements from the very beginning – to enable people working together, no matter which operating system, which machine, or what quality of Internet connection they might have. The whole iTea portal user interface has been carefully tested by many translators and project managers in real life under variety of environments (Linux, Windows, Mac …) and web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Konqueror, Safari …) of various versions. The whole working group may sit in one office, or each member may be located in a different place. The team members may be – translators, project managers, proofreaders, editors, DTP workers, accountants (external or internal), administrators, and … clients of course. Each of them has own working environment accessible over web browser and secured by login credentials, yet all of them working with one database.
Advantage of server based solution
The core is the server – the iTea portal shall be installed on a server accessible over Internet/intranet. This is the only installation required for the system operation. No clients are necessary. This goes also hand in hand with the advantage of centrally managed, secured, backed-up, and controlled machine, which can afford a quality network connection.
Scalability
As we have one server and no clients the question of involving more people in business, hiring more translators, employing more project managers etc. is not connected with any extra installations, not to say costs. Simply ask administrator to add the person to the list of authorized users, set the login and password, and a new colleague may start and join the working team instantly from his/her place when he/she opens his/her preferred web browser. One can peacefully grow, the iTea portal will expand along with his business.
Control and overview
Once all team members work with one centrally managed database you can always have complete and true control and overview of all jobs in progress, people who are busy, costs of each individual project and phase, you can search any past file or project with few clicks from any place, trace any past project’s development in cases of ex-post corrections or references needed, you receive automated e-mail notifications, and much more.
Multilingual nature
The iTea portal supports not only unlimited* number of UI languages that may be individually defined for each portal user, but also, thanks to the fact that the database is UTF-8 encoded, just any alphabet used for entering system data e.g. translators‘ names, project managers notes to translators, category descriptions, file names typed in interactively from local project managers, notes from translators to project managers input directly to the system etc. The real files with translations, references, translation memories etc. distributed through the iTea portal may be obviously simply any files in any language combinations (any binary data). Thus the iTea portal becomes truly a multilingual environment for cooperation.
* Currently supported UI languages are English, German, Czech, Hungarian and Croatian.
Brief overview of the iTea portal roles
The iTea portal helps you from the initial project phase to the financial end. During the whole life cycle of a project different people need to access and add/modify project data, files, and documents.
There are several roles (that may be combined) foreseen within the iTea portal. Once you are assigned several roles a role selector will appear in your UI after logging in.
Roles
- Role of a translator or more generally of someone who participates as a team member on producing the final translated documents (proofreader, editor, DTP specialist etc.).
- Someone who leads the team, assigns jobs, creates projects, follows the deadlines, communicates with team members, and sends final results to client is a project manager.
- Each project needs to be financially complete. All purchase orders incoming and outgoing must be prepared and processed, all invoices paid, and all costs covered. This is the role of an accountant.
- Book-keeping needs to have its documents and facts to be able to prepare statutory financial statements, submit necessary tax statements, calculate costs etc. All information contained in the iTea portal already represents this source for an accountant guest, who does not need to modify the iTea portal data, but needs its results.
- Role of statistics which allows managers to create various overviews, tables, aggregate data, calculate averages, sums, percentages, and ratios across the selected periods, data sets, persons, clients etc. – both for volumes and for financial data.
- There are settings, once entered information, and configuration values the iTea portal needs to work properly. An administrator is the person who takes care of it.
Selected screenshots
Translator
Screen of a translator after logging in and entering My projects menu option (two first screens below). A screen showing selected project’s details – after clicking Details link on the right side of selected project on the previous screen and selecting Wordcounts, deadlines bookmark you can see something like this (third screen below).
Project manager
Apart of other things a project manager must have a possibility to create a new project, add team members to it, set deadlines, and distribute files.
Accountant
Accountant in the iTea sense does not equal book-keeper. An accountant is a person (persons) who is authorized to manipulate, review, create, and modify all financial aspects of projects and related book-keeping documents as purchase orders, incoming and outgoing, invoices, incoming and outgoing etc. An accountant creates these book-keeping documents, supervises payments from/to bank etc. but does not lead any books. This person may be understood as a financial supervisor or manager in an executive sense.
- Purchase orders – a part where the incoming invoices, outgoing purchase orders, and related payments are controlled i.e. where the interaction with translators is managed.
- Invoices – a part where the outgoing invoices, incoming purchase orders, and related payments are controlled i.e. where the interaction with clients is managed.
