The Christmas holiday is not the best time to do an exhaustive Internet search. And yet I must persevere.
TWiki is still looking good, but it should be evaluated on a comprehensive background of information about its competitors. One of the more interesting ones is:
Achievo (www.achievo.org)
At first glance Achievo has some interesting features. Its free, web-based, open source, claims to be fully adjustable to company requirements, and has both project management and time tracking. You can view an online demo of the latest stable build or latest nightly build. That’s where the first suspicious thing shows up, because the latest nightly build is dated, and its dated 22-08-2007. This hasn’t been updated since August? As always, I head straight for the demo.
The demo provides a menu with a lot of promising links, such as Time Surveys, Project Planning, and Employee Statistics. However, it’s also got links for Sales and Organizations, two things that I don’t really think will come up any time soon. Also, each page load is slow. Additionally, there are many variables which must be set for a specifically small thing, such as reporting time worked, and setting many of these variables requires a complete page reload. This program could use some serious Ajaxification. Page load times might simply be a result of a bare-bones demo server, but it serves to emphasize that you must reload pages often, for selecting the simplest things. Also, projects seem to have phases, which I haven’t considered. It might be interesting to add in the future.
The entire thing, however, feels like early 2000 with trash can links next to items in a list to delete them, check boxes next to what could be quite a long list with no way to check all, and the whole thing just seems to be too slow, too old, and too unpopulated. The August timestamp for the latest build is continuously troubling. A final analysis is:
Pricing: free, open source
Project Features: no Wikiness
Time Tracking: Present, annoying to fill out
Work Reports: Not really present
Bloat Level: Sales, Organizations sections
Web 2.0ness: No wikiness, no Ajaxity, constant reloading
Serendipities: Project phases
ProjectPier (www.projectpier.org)
ProjectPier is more of the same vein in what I’m looking for, a free, open-source, self-hosted PHP application used for managing projects and tasks and teams through a web interface. It seems to be a fork of activecollab.com, which means that it should be more evolved. This saves me the trouble of checking out activecollab.com myself. There’s a short explanation as to why, which is that activecollab 1.0 is going to be a commercial product and ProjectPier.. isn’t.
There isn’t a demo of ProjectPier, which means that I’m stuck reading the Tour link. It’s got all sorts of goodies, including E-mail notification. That’s nice, I suppose, although I wasn’t explicitly looking for it. It says it’s about tasks, milestones, files, and messages, the things of everyday work. No limit to projects, clients, users, and tasks either apparently. It’s based off of PHP and should be scalable to grow with me. So sayeth the intro page.
The quick start guide says that I can start off by creating a project which is typing in a name for the project and a short description. However, this seems like it is a common problem with these project management tools. I don’t want just a short description of a project on the page, I want all relevant details. There are some screenshots which show a focus on milestones and recent activities. This seems to be very similar to Achievo in layout and style.
Ahh, who am I kidding, I keep thinking about Twiki. I need to stop this futile analysis and install a Twiki install.
Pricing: free, open source
Project Features: TWiki is better
Time Tracking: TWiki is better
Work Reports: TWiki is better
Bloat Level: TWiki is better
Web 2.0ness: TWiki is better
Serendipities: TWiki
Filed under: UI, interface design, project management, usability, web 2.0
Hi there;
Thanks for your blog posting. I would encourage you to take a look at Joint Contact. It’’s not open source, but we do have a free hosted version that would seem to meet your needs.
Unlike competing applications such as activeCollab, we take a fresh approach and allow you to manage documents, contact lists, email, tasks and team information for multiple projects quickly and easily.
To sign up for a free account visit us online at http://www.jointcontact.com
Hi,
have you tired Wrike.com?
I turned out to be the best one for me
And BTW I’ve never heard of the ones you’re writing about here, probably you just picked the wrong apps?
http://www.wrike.com
Thanks both of you for your suggestions. I just found the ones I’m writing about here by searching for “online project management” on Google. Unfortunately I didn’t find either Joint Contact or Wrike doing that. You guys might want to work on your keywords. I know we still have to work on our own keywords here at PalBee!
we are looking for open source — project management tool with client login functionality.
Thanks