Version 1.5 enables you to organise projects more efficiently, create more professional notes, and bolster your institution's digital sovereignty with new collaboration features.
OpenProject 16.0 marked a major release and introduced a number of fundamental improvements to project organisation. The latest update in openDesk 1.5, version 16.0.1, delivers minor bug fixes.
Other new features include automatically generated work package titles, enhanced export configurations, improved storage status checks and project diagram sharing for all users. Full details are available in the official OpenProject release notes. Here are our favourite improvements that offer the greatest added value in everyday administration with openDesk:
Users will enjoy the new backlog feature, which enables systematic management of agenda items across multiple meetings. By clearly separating active agendas from topic backlogs, teams can plan resources much more effectively and reduce the administrative effort of recurring meetings.
Project teams can flexibly move meeting topics between different dates and derive agenda items directly from work packages. This clear structure makes it easier to prepare for meetings and track outstanding items across a project series.
For decision-makers, this brings greater transparency to project organisation and streamlines decision-making processes. The systematic recording and prioritisation of topical agenda items supports strategic project management and ensures a more comprehensive documentation of all key discussion points.
The new internal comments feature in work packages gives project administrators fine-grained control over internal communications. Role-based access rights ensure that confidential discussions remain securely separated from general project updates.
Team members can collaborate directly within the work package, without having to rely on external tools. Internal comments are visually distinguished by colour, making them easy to identify and reducing the risk of accidental publication.
The feature also enables internal alignment to be more clearly documented, so decision-making progress can be tracked reliably over time.
The new standalone time tracking module provides greater oversight of project resources and supports better compliance with common legal requirements by precisely documenting start and end times. Calendar integration improves the management of recurring time tracking tasks.
Staff can track their working hours intuitively via the calendar view and get automatic daily summaries of logged activities. Depending on individual needs, the view can be toggled between daily, weekly, or monthly formats to accommodate different planning preferences.
Project managers benefit from detailed PDF reports, which support resource planning and help fulfil legal documentation obligations. The automatic aggregation of time data also strengthens the basis for more strategic personnel planning and budgeting.
In addition to a number of bug fixes, the Notes app received an extensive overhaul of its table functionality. This improves performance when working with structured content while reducing system load during complex formatting tasks.
Users can now create more professional looking notes thanks to enhanced formatting options such as cell background colours, text alignment, and merged cells. New table headers also make it easier to generate clear data overviews for internal use and reconciliation.
Finally, our latest openDesk update contains a number of improvements for system administrators and DevOps teams.
The mailbox feature was improved with an update to the Dovecot CE chart, and now supports shared mailboxes and ACL-based authorisation. For more reliable authentication, integration between OX and Dovecot has been optimised to use login names instead of email addresses.
In addition, Dovecot alias support was added so that emails are delivered correctly to mailAlternativeAddress addresses. This simplifies the management of alternative email addresses in more complex organisational structures.
The OX App Suite was updated to version 8.37, which fixes various authorisation issues and minor warnings, and improves the overall stability of the email system.
You can find the entire changelog for openDesk 1.5 at openCode.
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