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 10:54 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…

Just adding to this run in conversation (because i too am having the dilemma and my efforts making my own version in CI got me close before time put a stop to that!)

I have run through and top runners do seem for me:

Active Collab - Paid for version, although it is an expense to pay to include time tracking $400ish, and license only valid for current major version.

Basecamp - Again an expense to pay - especially for plugins, addons, and more clients / projects.

Project Pier (Activecollab 0.7 fork) - Ideal, but no time tracking, which i ideally want.

OpenGoo (AC 0.7 Fork) - Exactly as ProjectPier, but with extra bits like time tracking. But somehow the information, especially the dashboard did not present the information i wanted / needed… But for those who wanted it… it does have multi-level task lists, as many as you want i think.

And now… just running out of ideas, getting tired, feeling a headache coming on, and the full active collab is looking might suitable right now!

Here is one more
http://www.freshbooks.com/

yes, freshbooks is a similar pricing model to BaseCamp but for more invoice orientated results… too many choices, and too tired eyes!

OpenGoo is a new contender then I don’t remember hearing of that brand of the old activeCollab.
I’ve still got projectPier going, and it’s coming handy to all the team members (me, myself and I).
Here’s a link to a review for OpenGoo from a year ago or so, they mention some sort of integration with Google Docs, sounds nice, but in the back of my mind I too wonder how secure GoogleDoc’s are?
http://www.OpenGoo.org for the straight dope on OG-ee hey that works.

Well i took the plunge with the full paid for version of ActiveCollab - and if i need to i will use their 30 day money back… But so far so good - will post an update at a later stage!

Open Goo is quite good. My Wife just installed that for a client and it does have quite a lot in there. Also very nicely laid out.

Not too difficult to add things into the code too as we needed to make a few changes here and there and managed to find our way around it quite quickly.

There are a lot of these types of things showing up nearly every day in my RSS feeds though, just too many to choose from sometimes!!

Best wishes,

Mark

Mmm OpenGoo looks interesting…

I need to hear more constructive feedback on 1.0 before taking a serious look.

I looked at the screenshots over at sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=191520
They’ve got it looking like a desktop app there, maybe goo is for oogly.
Can’t track down the requirements either, guess they were here.
Worth keeping an eye on.

You also might check out Assembla (http://www.assembla.com)—their service is basically project management + Subversion or Git repository + all kinds of other team tools (like a Wiki, etc.). And even though they just changed their pricing model it’d be pretty cheap for a couple of people.

and as soon as i buy something smashing magazine comes out with an article about this topic and whole heap of other options!
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/13/15-useful-project-management-tools/#comment-292832

I like Freshbooks. It works.