Thread

Hello people,
Looking for a bit of advice from those of you with true clients.
So far my game is consistent of ‘clients’ who at this point are friends with ‘website needs’ more than paying clients 😊

Doing ‘project collaboration’ at this point is made of emails and attachments and some more forwarded email reminding them what they said in the original email.
At this point of my ‘service’ is really not crucial to have a professional service behind it all but thinking ahead…

Billing:
FreshBooks
Seems reasonably priced and does look like it would do its job.

Project/tickets and file management:
Basecamp - basic
My needs are in the line of basecamp basic package of  
* 15 projects
* 3 GB storage
* Unlimited users
but the issue I am having that storage space is not enough - due to some of my less-skilled users.Their inability to re size image and compress/convert video is eating up space really quickly.

On the other hand I am sort for a file/security/control paranoid being how I always was/am in charge of managing these systems/servers in house for other businesses. Someone needs to email a large attachment=no problem, temporary adjust the mail quota…someone needs to upload a large file = open a firewall to my ftp server. I can not do this for myself…I don’t’ have the luxury of having servers and bundled T1 lines etc.

Soo…what do you recommend for a 1-man-few-projects-show?

Go ‘on-line’ and outsource with existing services or get something like Quicken for billing, use EE of my own site for support/ticketing (member group=client and access allow as such) and some free file hosting service (such as MediaFire).

What would you recommend or what worked well for your guys?
Thanks a bunch!

ProjectPier is a fork of ActiveCollab once that project started down the commercial route.

I have used both. ProjectPier isn’t terribly active in its development but ActiveCollab is actively developed and nearing a 2.0 release… Isn’t everybody? 😉

If you have very basic needs… ProjectPier might serve ok. If you want something more… take a trial run of AC.

If you think using a third-party hosting service is a viable alternative as you mentioned, why not use that in conjunction with Basecamp.  We use Basecamp for tens of projects at a time and I also use it for my larger freelance projects.  It works perfectly.  I think you would be hard pressed to find anything better in that space.

I too ended up using ActiveCollab after running through and testing multiple different ones. I wanted something i hosted and not a monthly fee as i soon saw this running up high costs.
Also you might like EE / CI own Derek Allard’s Bamboo Invoice - http://bambooinvoice.org/
Personally i created my own as i needed something to manage my reoccurring invoices for my hosting, domains, SSL certs, etc.

Ah and also - just for me - i converted ActiveCollab to work the Mozillas Prism, allowing it to have a PC based desktop icon, running a browser without all the bumpfffhh like addresses, buttons, etc getting in the way.

We’ve started playing around with Collabtive.

Yeah, i started playing with collabtive too… At the time it was not so complete as it is now, but i found there to be a few bits that i did not like in it, and that did not work for me - hence ActiveCollab…
It does look a lot more complete now though.

Thank you,
I have seen old thread where people were suggesting ProjectPier as well as ActiveCollab.
ActiveCollab seems really nice but some of the open source mentioned might be a good way to test the workload with the non-paying ‘customers’.
Didn’t know that Derek was involved with bamboo.
Perhaps Basecamp would be the best choice and giving away some of the control and responsibility of backups, maintenance could be a good thing down the line when this turns into more serious projects.
Thanks guys, comments and links appreciated!