Update: This post was written in April 2005 while dotProject v3 was still under active development by Keith Casey of CaseySoftware and others. Due to lack of progress, in 2007 we joined the dotProject fork known as web2project and haven't looked back. We don't know the status of dotProject, so please don't ask.
Well, those of us in the core group of dotProject have just begun to discuss the goals of the v3.0 release. Unlikely when maintenance of the project died off a few years back, AJ & Karen are working to keep things moving steadily and deliberately towards established goals.
The stated goals of v2.0 was to completely rebuild the permissions system. In v1.0.2, it lacked the granularity and sometimes completely failed in its purposes of limiting the access of data. In v2.0, this seems to be almost completely resolved. Since CaseySoftware hosts Project Management for a number of organizations, I have contrived a number of permissions scenarios exposing and hiding various levels of data from various users – with the organizations' permission of course. I'm proud to say that dotProject permformed just as expected in nearly every scenario. It's not perfect, but still pretty good.
From early v3.0 requirements and discussions, it will be a true wonder. Although I do not claim credit for this, I believe that a realistic and pragmatic discussion of strengths and weaknesses of dotProject to the numerous other Project Management Tools (Microsoft Project, GanttProject, etc) have reiterated some of the concerns and requests of the community and are reflected in the current Reqs & Specs documents.
Unforunately, I am not at liberty to pass this document around at this time. It is still in a draft form and only distributed to the core members of the project. But, if you have concerns, comments, questions, or requests that you believe will make dotProject the leading Project Management Tool, please feel free to contact me via commenting here, emailing me (webmaster @ caseysoftware), or post to the dotProject Forums.