Effective Project Management Software?

thisisvinod writes "Frustrated with the lack of efficient project monitoring features in MS Project 2000, I was searching on the web for something that would suit my needs. I want a tool that would be browser-based, which will allow the PM to delegate tasks to others, against which they can mark the "effort" spent on the task (as hours/minutes), not percentage complete. Along with that, features that would allow creating of tracking reports, sending of email notifications and would also provide integration with empirical data would be quite nice. Any ideas on which tool would provide all this? And I really do think that most project management tools fall drastically short of one thing or another - MS Project is beautiful, but seriously flawed in the monitoring business. I'm sure other Slashdot readers have faced similar problems, and might have good solutions." Update: 07/30 2pm EDT by C : For the curious, Ask Slashdot last tackled this issue in this Linux-specific article, and discussed web-based versions, here. It's been 2 years, any changes?

Comments

cross-platform support

[HaiLHaiL]

MS Project is beautiful, but seriously flawed in the monitoring business.

Also seriously flawed in that you need IE on Windoze to use its web access features.

You might want to check out Tutos. Dunno if it has all the features you want, but it's free and open source. Add what you need! :-)

MS Project lacks good task distribution too...

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

My key complaint about MS Project (and something I'd like to see as a feature in another package) is the poor project plan distribution mechanism. MS pretty much forces all participants to run Project just to see details of the tasks. We don't want to buy 100 copies for a couple of projects per year. Hence, we print out the whole, stinkin' project plan once a week. Of course, I'm sure there are several php and cgi based project management packages in varying degrees of finish, but I can't sell any of the managers in my company on unloading Project unless all of the functionality is there and the interface is very similar.

There are some really excellent products out there

[BitGeek]

One company who make wonderful product management software is Welcom-- www.wst.com.

I don't know if it fits your specific access requirements, but I do believe they have web browser access.

MS Project is "project for dummies". Its sorta a project management program, but not a real one-- not flexible, not standards based, and not used by professional project managers.

The WST software is really well done, really scalable, and really libertating, especially if you've been forced to use MS Project in the past.

Yes, I am a happy past customer, but not a paid spokesmodel.

karma whore strut...

[4of12]

Also seriously flawed in that you need IE on Windoze to use its web access features.

[Leave it to MS to never miss an opportunity to turn a great concept on its head to leverage the rest of their product line:) The folks at MS who actually implemented the web access feature in Project must have had the breath knocked out of them at the "IE specialization".]

Nevertheless, the concept of web based project management is still a really good one. Not only for read-access to view what's going on, but also to help formulate project plans.

I prefer to spend my time programming, but have had brushes with project planning exercises and noted the dearth of good open source alternatives to MS Project (which, practically, seems to require some training in order to learn the quirks of how to use it.)

The most intriguing development I've seen is out of the Horde Project (a PHP framework for web applications).

They mention something called Nag that came out 1.0 on June 11 of this year, but I don't know what it's really like.

But I can see where having an XML database for projects that is accessed via PHP would be a good thing. That, and having some SVG enabled browsers (and server code) to create and view Gantt charts on the fly.

Since I'm throwing buzzwords and wishlists about, I may as well suggest that WebDAV would be a great part of such a tool because it would offer a good means for collaborative authoring of project plans, which is really how the best ones get done. (The worst ones are guesses and dictats that make everyone mad.)