Thanks Leslie. I think someone mentioned that in a previous post but You are correct that there are some additional features in AC vs PP. I just did not need those additional features and quite honestly could not get AC to install on my Godaddy shared hosting even with support. So…  I chose the free way since all I really needed was a console that I could create task lists and assign tasks to employees and make any notes that were necessary for them to know what to do…

M.

MarcusNeto - 26 May 2008 11:54 AM

I wanted something that had nested tasks (which to my knowledge does not exist), something that was easy to modify the look and feel and something that was free. I got most of that with project pier and it seems that collabtiv offers it as well…
M.

As far as i can tell, collabtiv does not have nested tasks. What it has is Milestones, Task Lists, and Tasks, in that hierarchy. Unfortunately, Task lists cannot be made subordinate to Milestones, so it’s not a true hierarchy, which is VERY DISAPPOINTING. But true unlimited nesting would be the most delicious.

Which is too bad for me, because i love the collabtiv interface; it’s the most modern ajaxistic minimalicious interface i’ve seen yet (at least in the free/open-source space). I love how they only show functionality you need, based on context.

Sadly, they also lack gannt charts. Collabtiv, get jiggy!

Any update MarcusNeto?
projectpier feels as if it was built on drupal…

Anyone tried Zoho or even better a freebie dotproject?

Yeah actually because of the way we work internally I just went to Things for my MBP and iphone. I just could not justify spending billable hours updating the system when my clients were not really interested in taking part in the project management console. If we start to get into projects that require a project management console I will revisit this topic but for the time being we have abandoned ProjectPier. Not because of it’s functionality because we found that to be decent but rather because our clients dont require it and we do not have a whole lot of time to fill in the blanks…

Thanks MarcusNeto,
Seems like a lot of 1-2 man shops have this dilemma. From what I see, email for notes & exchange of info and Quickbooks for billing does the trick.
Thanks for the update and sharing.

OK so this is totally off of the original topic but the best advice I could give to another small shop owner would be to hire an accountant to track the income and expenses weekly. I wish I had done it a year ago. Having all of your reports available to you and being able to make decisions knowing what your financial positions is is wonderful. And most are about the cost of an hour or two of your time per week. I dont know about you but 1-2 hours of income for the peace of mind is great.

And I really dig billings for invoicing. Quickbooks was a sledgehammer when I needed much much smaller tool. As a matter of fact I have a fully licensed, new in box, never opened version of Quickbooks I am looking to sell (Mac). If anyone is interested drop me a line. It was too much software for me…