Thread

I went back to the thread that some of us had 6 months ago or so and was trolling for a project management system. One that strikes my fancy is GoPlan. Another is ClockingIT. BaseCamp irritates me because of it’s lack of support for nested to-dos and cost. So… does anyone have any experience with ClockingIT? It seems as mature as the other two. The thing that worries me is the mom and pop feel that it has to it. Sorry but I would prefer that they charge a bit and know that they are not going to pull the plug on hosting the tool because bandwidth has gotten too much… And GoPlan seems to have the right features…

My Requirements?
Web based so my employees can see it from wherever.
Nested To-Do lists
Project Templates would be nice
integration with iCal and Apple Mail please…

The rest of the stuff is necessary but done by many…
Calendar, Milestones, File Sharing, A client approval process for a milestone that has been completed would be nice.

Any thoughts?
M.

Well… maybe with Monday around the corner someone will post…. someone?  someone?  Anyone?

lol…

M.

I looked and looked and tried GoPlan, ActiveCollab, and the various knock-offs. Basecamp won out because it took virtually no explanation to clients how to use it. For an internal team, you might check out Copper Project Management.

If you remove web-based from your requirements, you should give Daylite from Market Circle a look, it has very tight integration with Apple Mail and is well-thought of in Mac-centric small biz circles.

Good luck.

Daylight would probably be a good way to go if it was not so expensive. a single license is 200$ and I will probably need several.

So after spending all day yesterday I feel like I have exhausted all of the possibilities… I researched most of the available web project management tools and am right back where I stated… Basecamp.

It seems like most of the other PM tools are nothing more than to-do list organizers. The reason they call themselves PM tools is because they allow for the attachment of a date to the To-do. And sometimes they give a percent complete and the possibility of adding notes.

IIRC I did not like GoPlan because it made the clients register as a user. Most of my clients would fail miserably at doing this. They just would not deem it necessary.

ClockingIT had a kinda kludgy interface and while I like Open Source projects for somethings I do not like it for this. Perhaps some of you can respond about your feelings when it comes to Open Source projects and business critical apps.

5PM was more of a task list organizer. Very nice and intuitive interface. Definitely more complex interface than some of the others. But not a whole lot of functionality besides task lists organized in hierarchical view and a timeline generated based on due dates.

Remember the Milk (or RTM) seems to be getting alot of attention for their abilities with To-Do lists. But that is all they seem to be focusing on.

@task did not make the cut because they want to “demo” their product for you. I read that as expensive and confusing. neither of which is something I want.

It is important to note that some of the applications like to consider themselves true Project Management tools. They incorporate charts and scheduling features that are supposed to keep the project on track. They deem Basecamp more of an online collaboraton tool because of it’s lack of these features. And I would tend to agree. Basecamp is a good way of keeping track of conversations you are having with your clients… but then I ask myself whether this is something that can just continue to be handled via email. My Mail app has folder after folder of emails from clients for posterity…

I’ve been through a very similar search and have thus-far not seen any one product that really hits the nail on the head.  I’m using the free version of basecamp for one of my side projects just to test it out and I like it fairly well - though it is a little too simplistic in areas.  One could easily spend hundreds of dollars per month subscribing to all the different niche products that they offer in an attempt to get the features of a well rounded project management system.

In the end, I will probably end up developing my own.  I think I have a contract coming up that will allow me to do the bulk of the development on a specialized application for a client.  I could modify it appropriately for release as an EE module.  Unfortunately, this is all pie-in-the-sky until the negotiations are done.

Hi MarcusNeto,
Have you consider using something such as Filemaker…It comes with pretty decent templates and adons in some flawor PM/CRM and also leaves enough room for you to mod anything you need.
Networks pretty easy through LAN of macs,win and nix boxes, publishes to web with IWP,Lasso,CMDL or PHP if you need it online.
Best of all..you end you with a great mid-entperprise size database that is cross platform.
It would not be a turnkey solution but in the long run…
check out: http://www.filemaker.com/downloads/flash/fm_new_user_demo/?homepage=fmp9_new_to_fm
Perhaps not what you need…but it is a thought.
All the best!

lebisol, I appreciate your thoughts but that is a little overkill for the small 2 man operation that
I have right now. I really do not want to have to build something as anything that is not billable is money not going into my pocket.

I had checked out activecollab but thought the price too high till I did the calculation of 1 year of basecamp at 24 per month. I may have to go back and see what it has to offer…

M.

No worries,not sure of your budget is but that Business Productivity Kit is free while I think that each licence for FileMaker is about $270.00 You would not need a server as you can share database between two of you over LAN.

Again this is more of a “workgroup” solution…and would be an overkill. I would still suggest a free demo download just to have some comparision.

I totally understand on desire to keep things at min cost.

Maybe check on some open srouce: http://www.softwareprojects.org/free-project-management-software.htm
Sorry, this is all I can think of right now.
All the best!

I am test driving ActiveColab at the moment. Haven’t used it much but I will be running my own site’s project management from it so I can see if it’s worth moving from Basecamp.

Nested Tasks is a big one for me as is time management (which you have to pay $50 a month for in Basecamp!)

A Gantt chart would be nice but one step at a time 😊

I like both Basecamp and activeCollab (AC latest version is 1.1) because they offer what I need in a PM program. Basecamp makes you start faster because there’s almost nothing to explain, very easy to use and that’s why I’m paying for it. ActiveCollab has more functionalities but sometimes it feels like it offers more than what you need. It’s not as simple and IMO doesn’t look as nice as Basecamp.

I’ve tried many more, but so far I find the above are the most worthy of your money.

Seriously, both of you need to check out project pier. It is the same as activecollab(hosted on your server) and is open source. I have been using it for about 3 weeks now and have fallen in love with it. Very easy to use. And ... Cheap! I was looking at something in the neighborhood of 150$ per month with Basecamp! Not! And although I have installed many different types of applications in many different types of environments I was not able to install activecollab. Must have been me right? Anyway, check out projectpier.

M.

Yes Project Pier looks promising, but it’s just a fork of the old ActiveCollab. I find it a little unappealing and slow.

Hey MarcusNeto

Have you tried Collabtive jet? Just like project pier… its hosted on your server and its open source. They are still on beta stage but I really recommend you to take it for a spin. Its working great for me.

I just went and viewed the demo for collabtiv. It looks great. But quite honestly not anymore functionality than what I have with projectpier. The killer for me would be nested tasks as someone mentioned before. But alas none of the current collarative projects have that or at least none of the ones I have seen.

As to your thoughts on the looks of project pier yes it is very ugly out of the box, but I found it extremely easy to integrate into my current site. To see some screen shots take a look at the blog post I wrote.

http://www.bluefishdesignstudio.com/index.php?/blog/articles/basecamp_vs_project_pier/

The big thing is that the code is spot on. xHTML is semantic. Things that should be lists are and items that should be headings are as well. The CSS is broken up a bit but after you figure that out updating the look and feel is quite easy. The hardest problem I had was finding the location of the img tag for the icons for deleting or editing something. Once I found them though (search in dreamweaver took about 10 seconds) I was able to swap them out for some others…

Anyway, most of the collaboration management software on the market is all the same. Some may have a slightly different look and some slick ajax movement (like collabtiv). 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.

Noyce!  Thanks for the information guys!  I definitely enjoyed your write-up, MarcusNeto.

I am in dire need of a project management system - but don’t feel the urge to throw all that money at Basecamp.  Both of these projects look great to me and I’ve downloaded both for evaluation.  Thanks!