Effective Project Management Software? 38
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?
cross-platform support (Score:5, Insightful)
Also seriously flawed in that you need IE on Windoze to use its web access features.
You might want to check out Tutos [tutos.org]. Dunno if it has all the features you want, but it's free and open source. Add what you need!
SF (Score:2, Insightful)
Not likely to see an OSS equivalent of MS Project (Score:3, Insightful)
Most OSS projects are organized an operate differently from commercial projects. In OSS projects, the project plan is generally a fairly vague list of tasks with some rough prioritization and a little discussion of how they are interrelated. This is completely different from a typical commercial project, where the timeline and budget have to be worked out in advance, often before approval to begin the project is even received. This provides the need for tools like Project, which can take a list of tasks with defined intertask relationships and resource assignments and compress and level them to produce a tight project plan (well, actually it takes a lot of work by the user to make it tight, but the tool helps a *lot* by helping to avoid certain kinds of insane assumptions -- unless the user explicity requests the insanity 'cause the boss says we have to shave another month off, but I digress).
What OSS projects do need is a way for widely distributed folks to be able to sign up for tasks and report progress, and there are a few different solutions out there for this problem (which other posters have mentioned).
The strength and the weakness of the volunteer, community development model is that people write what they themselves need, not what others may need. In many cases, the needs of the developers are shared by many others. In other cases, they're not, and for those types of software volunteer development is unlikely to bear fruit.