Project Management Software
The Web Group office is planning to develop our own online project management system in the next month or so. We’ve tried a few existing solutions, but nothing really fits us that well. So the time has come to bite the bullet and make ourselves exactly what we want. Currently we’re in the planning phase, trying to figure out what features to include.
My question to you is this: What are your favorite features (existing or non-existing) of project management software? What do you find the most useful? Are there features you could live without? I’ll post some of the features we decide to implement once development starts, but I wanted to see if anyone had any insightful input.
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Published February 09, 2005 by:
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Gantt Charts!
February 9th, 2005
What pm systems have you tried and what were the strengths and weaknesses of each?
btw: get in contact with Nathan of PlaygroundBlues… I know he was working on a similar project a little while ago.
February 9th, 2005
http://basecamphq.com/ is a great place to start.
Eric
February 9th, 2005
Infowit’s PM Software, Basecamp, and Creative Manager Pro have all been taken for a spin. I can’t really speak as to their shortcomings, as those decisions are left to the PM’s, but from a Developer standpoint, what features in Project Management software make your job easier?
February 9th, 2005
One of the largest hassles in our office is keeping on top of correspondence and files for a project. For example, an e-mail goes out but not everybody is cc’d on it, often leaving key employees in the dark. Likewise for files (content, translations, etc) often get e-mailed only to one or two people. If you come into a project half way through, you don’t have any of this documentation.
So I came up with this idea when we were thinking of redoing our internal PM software: Each new project that gets created within the application creates a new e-mail address that is associated to that project. All e-mails for the project are then sent to that address. Any e-mail received then gets sent to all people assigned to the project. Any file attachments are stripped and stored on the file server and a link is placed in the outgoing e-mail.
Anybody could log into the web admin and view all correspondence that has been sent on the project and a list of all files for the project.
As a user possibly not heavily involved in the project, you could have a setting somewhat like a mailing list to receive correspondence in digest format once a day or once a week.
How’s that? :)
February 9th, 2005
Our company has put together a nice list of components that have been very flexible among all our clients.
Our clients range from a wide variety such as college athletic departments, professional media icons, even local restaurants. All have been satisfied with our content management system. Of course if I told you about anything, I’d have to <sacrcasm>kill you</sarcasm>
February 9th, 2005
I used to work for Bard College as a PHP developer. We too built our own PMS (:chuckle:).
The needs of a university web group are definately somewhat different than those assumed by most public PM systems. Why? I don’t know… just is.
February 10th, 2005
Combine the content with the layout dynamically and at the last moment. This makes it easier to ‘do things’ to the content, such as adding acronyms (check out photomatt script) etc.
February 14th, 2005
customer comments and approval of elements, submission of issues and aamendments and attachment of files, easy access to call logging and ability to attach emails to a log entry, ability to upload and archive prototype files and links to demo websites
February 23rd, 2005
whats the PMS system promoted using a propella symbol?
February 23rd, 2005
Hello,
I have tried the 3 that you mentioned and didn’t like them, but have one found that I do like: http://www.php-collab.org/blog/
It does provide Gantt Charts and lots of other useful features. Additionally, you can choose what you publish to a Project site, so that you can upload docs, include notes but then only publish the info that you want the client to view.
March 9th, 2005