Grindstone Sync
Grindstone Sync is a service that lets Grindstone apps for each member of your team talk to each other, bringing everyone’s time tracking together.
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When connected to Grindstone Sync, Grindstone will show you all the people on your team. Specific people can be assigned to specific work items, each with their own due dates, estimates, and completion dates.
People and assignments can be seen, managed, filtered, searched, and monitored through views, just like everything else in Grindstone.
Administrator Benefits
As an administrator for your team, you can see everyone’s time tracking information, not just your own. This lets you apply all of Grindstone’s powerful graphing and exporting tools to everybody’s work. But more than that, each Grindstone app is maintaining a live synchronization with Grindstone Team. This means that whenever you’re looking at everyone’s time tracking information, you’re looking at it live. You can actually watch people track their time as they do it. Staying on top of what everyone’s doing can be a daunting task, so let Grindstone help you by telling it what to watch out for. It’s easy to set up monitored views with specific filters that will notify you of things as they happen. Grindstone will keep you informed about what matters to you.
Grindstone Sync features a complete REST Web API, letting third parties access your team’s data when you want them to. If you want to connect Grindstone Sync to another app or service designed to integrate with it, you can create the necessary API key within Grindstone itself, plug that in to your third party tool, and you’re off to the races. If you want to develop your own apps or services to connect to Grindstone Sync, there is detailed documentation that shows you how to do anything you want to do.
Permissions
Flexible permissions are available to make sure people don’t do what they shouldn’t do. You can tell Grindstone Sync whether your team members are allowed to create, modify, or delete properties and work items, and set a time limit for how late they can make changes to their time slices. You can also put work items on a need-to-know basis, only allowing team members to see work items that have been assigned to them. And since managing assignments for everybody might get daunting if your team is large enough, you can tell Grindstone Sync who in your team supervises whom.
Grindstone Sync will allow supervisors to exercise administrative authority, but only when it comes to data surrounding who they supervise. Grindstone Sync is even smart enough to make sense of hierarchies on its own, so if the leader of a whole division is made the supervisor of a selection of team leaders, she is implicitly able to supervise their subordinate team members as well.
Security
Security is taken seriously by Grindstone Sync. Each person’s password is secured by powerful encryption algorithms. When a team member connects a Grindstone app to your Grindstone Sync service, they have the ability to revoke that app’s connection, should they lose control of the device on which the app was installed. And, all communications between Grindstone and Grindstone Sync are protected by industry-standard SSL encryption.
Grindstone Sync comes in two varieties: Cloud and Server.
Grindstone Sync Cloud is hosted inside Microsoft Azure, and managed and monitored by Epiforge technicians, which means you do not need to purchase additional hardware or hire an IT staff to use it. It costs just $5 per user, per month, and starts with a free 30-day trial. Signing up and getting your cloud subscription takes about sixty seconds.
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On the other hand, if you do have the resources to manage your own servers and perhaps even have regulations or agreements requiring you to keep your team’s time tracking data on site, you can set up a Grindstone Sync Server in your own environment. Flexible licensing allows you to purchase only as many seats as you today, and purchase the additional seats you’ll need tomorrow.