Friday, August 15th, 2008

Review of Project Management Tools - Google Docs & Calendar, Zoho, Codebeamer, Dotproject, gForge

Project Management suites are, in my own words, absolutely essential for application development companies. They empower project teams to manage documentations, plan milestones, organize meetings and facilitate communications - and more importantly, involves our precious clients seamlessly so you don’t have to waste too much managing tedious, angsty, never-ending back & forth communications. I can now claim myself to be a real matter expert in this field because I have tried all of the above mentioned applications before settling for 1 for my purpose. I must say there is no 1 single perfect suite for my needs, as they certainly have different offerings and features. I certainly have my preferences though. While the above apps are not the only one, (there are others like 37signals’s basecamp which cost quite a tidy sum.. you try them and let me know how they fare), they are certainly free at least to a reasonable certain extent. Without further ado, there is the lowdown on them:

Codebeamer
This is the very 2nd project management tool I have ever used after Project-lifeline, a now defunct project management tool developed in house by SMU Students. Codebeamer, developed by Itland, does not come cheap for its commercial version. Its free version allow only up to 5 users, and with many functionalities disabled. When I contacted the salesperson to enquire about the cost, they give me the impression of being rather shady - they evaded a question I have regarding whether the free version had a certain feature (which he told me its only available on paid for version, but I later discovered myself that the free version had that feature), and quoted me quite an astronomical price - about USD$1,000 for about 100 users (though my company has obviously not grown that huge)

Service aside, Codebeamer has a subversion integration capability that allows administrators to set up SVN easily. Under documentations, ACL is nicely implemented. You can even plot sequence diagrams and other uml notations with text. CB has a very nice interface which is using to create your own wiki blog, and a nice integration workflow structure which allows linking of documents to everywhere else. Like Zoho, Codebeamer has a forum functionality and notification mechanism for new documents and forum post.

What I do not savor however is the lack of Calendar function. Codebeamer has a tasklist and milestone feature but for me that is insufficient. Codebeamer, which is being supported by JavaForge, may be well-liked by big software firms but for my purpose, I needed something that is easier to use and integrates well with word documents. One more thing; it looks horrible on Safari and Firefox 3.

Google Docs & Calendar
My pursuit of an integration tool with Calendar and Documents bring me towards exploring Google’s offering - Docs and Calendar. Now there is a huge problem 2 hrs into my experiment; Google Doc does not offer project management features at all. Instead of a many-users-to-1-portal-with-many-docs model, they use a many-users-to-many-docs model. Meaning, documents are being shared at a user level, instead of at a project level. Thus, it becomes difficult to manage these documentations. A solution would be everyone share a single Google account to log into the portal, but this opens a can of worm on audit trail issues. Without any doubt though, Google Doc is easily the best in the office suite in terms of usability.

On a separate issue, Google Calendar is just beautiful to bits. It is easy to move and drag events, and has a nice reminder feature (I heard if you are in States, you get SMS reminder service). Google Calendar allows users to share calendar and to publish their own. I will be looking closely at Google’s foray into project management aspects.

Dotproject
This is an open source project from the land of Mercedez (and CB). The best part of it? It is free, deployable on your own server (like Codebeamer), runs on PHP so you can just use some webhosting companies and has many plugin availables from the OS community. However, the userablity of Dotproject has a lot of room to improve; In an age where AJAX is so commonly used, Dotproject lags far behind in user interactivity.

gForge
To be honest, I only tried gForge, which is vastly similar to Codebeamer in its core features for a while before I give up. I cannot comment much except that it is free, and allows users to set up SVN and track bugs easily - just like Codebeamer. What stops me from proceeding further with it is in its lack of abilities to allow me to write documentations immediately without having the need to upload.

Zoho Projects
I love Zoho to bits. Ive told many friends about it, and even the forum moderators in Zoho. To me, Zoho projects is almost on the brink of perfection, except for some minor bugs and wishful features I really want; such as integration with Zoho Calendar (which is nice to drag and drop), and offline synchronisation of documents. Zoho projects is Google Docs in a project management suit. It has a wonderful multiple portals and projects management which allow users to change portals and projects easily. The calendar features is easy to use and Zoho Write (MS version of Ms word) and Zoho Sheet (MS version of excel) is very friendly (:

Another article about Zoho that gives you a better idea on the office applications:
http://www.twistermc.com/blog/2006/06/20/zoho-online-office-applications

I feel Zoho Projects has huge potential, with its killer low price and responsive replies response from its support. With its all round integration functionality, the value curve offering, imho, is a notch above others.

Thats all folks. Please leave me a comment if you disagree or if you like what you read (: