Ben Higginbottom wrote:
On 5/20/05, mourik jan heupink <heupink@intech.unu.edu> wrote:
We have a network based on samba/ldap pdc with windows xp clients. Now all of a sudden 'they' (the boss, secretaries) decided they want ms-project.
MSProject is a very good app, except for the obvious drawback of being very expensive and rather too advanced for the casual user, chances are they'll never use it.
Some disagreement here - MSProject is an adequate project management tool; unfortunately Microsoft's marketing methods means it successfully killed all the good project management tools (TimeLine anyone?) or moved them into highly specialised hideously expensive niche markets (Artemis). MS Project is full of obscure messy features that may be useful, or may cause you to mis-estimate a project and blow out your estimates by 40% because you dragged-and-dropped the wrong thing.
Does anyone here know an open source package that does the same? (roughly the same) Or at least something that does not (as I guess ms project does) require a native windows environment?
GanttProject (http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/) runs off Java and provides similar functionality, the next few months they plan on providing mpp compatability. TaskJuggler ships with Suse, and is an excellent project management tool, but currently I belive that its Unix only.
There are also several webbased management tools, and to add some relevance, theres even one (not very good) included with SLOX .
Unfortunately, at least last time I checked, none of the Open Source tools came anywhere near MS Project for features and ease of use. GanttProject has a nice UI, but several severe limitations - last time I checked, at least, it used Days as the only time unit, so you couldn't do scheduling or resourcing on an hourly basis. It also had very limited calendaring - the latest version handles weekends, but I'm not sure that it does anything more complex than that. There are other project management tools that have better features, but crappy UIs - usually they are web based, easy to manage projects, but with no nice gantt-chart based interface for quick *building* of projects, and again they are usually lacking in little details like hourly schedules :) Most of my research on this is a few years old, I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be a good cross-platform FOSS replacement for MS-Project, crappy as it is. Sigh. I was using better project management tools 15 years ago, for goodness' sake... - Korny -- Kornelis Sietsma e-mail: korny at my surname dot com