If you attended the Dive In: Join or Start an Open Source Community session at Dreamforce, you are well aware that Milestones PM, one of our most successful Force.com Labs apps to date, is open source.  You and your developer friends can head straight over to our GitHub account, ForceDotComLabs, and get the code, check out the issues list and, today, for the first time, check out our fancy new Version History.

This particular version, 1.53, is good because it includes a long requested feature, Task and Milestone dependencies.  This feature is very easy to use.  If you want to make a task or milestone dependent on a predecessor, simply complete the field “Predecessor Milestone”.

If you want to see what tasks or milestones are dependent on your current record, simply look at the Successor Tasks (Milestones) related list.

When you make a task or milestone dependent, you tie together deadline and kickoff dates.  For example, in the picture above, where milestone “2. Manual Configuration” is dependent on predecessor milestone “1. Basic App Install”, if you were to change the deadline for #1, the kickoff date for #2 would advance accordingly.  If you want to adjust these from the Gantt chart, you can.  (However, as noted in the release notes, the Gantt chart doesn’t automatically refresh.)

Special thanks to the good folks at Axlea, particularly Jeremy and Kevin, who have done some really nice work here.  If their GitHub streams are to be believed, not to mention Jeremy’s presentation during “Dive In” above, we should expect some more really interesting changes from them in the near future.

Curious about whether or not you can contribute to the project?  You can, and there’s no coding required.   Questions?  Feel free to ask here, on @ReidCarlberg or over on http://ReidPl.us.