June 14, 2004 (This post is more than 2 years old.)

Managing Projects

development

So - open question - what software program (either a "real" app or a web app) do you use to manage projects? I'm looking for something that I can simply setup a group of projects in - enter random notes about said projects - maybe set a status - maybe show a list of folks assigned to projects - etc. I don't need anything too complex per se. Right now I'm playing with OneNote, which seems pretty cool, and open ended enough for my needs, but my worry is that it will be useless once I hit the road. (Unless I copy my data files to the laptop and then copy them back.)

I could, of course, build a nice Flex app to handle this, but I have an immidiate need for this as my handwritten notes are getting harder to read. ;)

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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Vui Lo posted on 6/15/2004 at 1:37 AM

Hope this one helps:
MasterList-XL (http://safarisoftware.com/M... which
Joel recommends (http://www.joelonsoftware.c... )

Comment 2 by Erik Madsen posted on 6/15/2004 at 1:57 AM

I'm currently using a web-based app built in-house specifically for our needs. I have worked other places where we used onProject.com and that was decent.

Comment 3 by Ted posted on 6/15/2004 at 2:16 AM

http://www.basecamphq.com/

Comment 4 by David posted on 6/15/2004 at 2:35 AM

PHP Collab is quite nice.

http://www.php-collab.com/

It was modelled on Macromedia's Sitespring (dicsontinued).

It's easy to install and use.

Comment 5 by Matt Fusfield posted on 6/15/2004 at 3:04 AM

Check out Onfolio - its really handy for keeping notes, messages, web pages, files - pretty much anything. While it needs to be installed on a computer, everything you copy into it goes into a single collection file, which is easily copied over the network or on a USB flash drive and opened on another machine.

Comment 6 by David posted on 6/15/2004 at 3:38 AM

Onfolio is an interesting suggestion. I briefly tried a trial version because I was interested in the blog integration via XML-RPC however I encountered an FTP bug when uploading media. If the FTP bug has been fixed it would allow you to post your Onfolio notes to a web accessible location. Hmm.

Comment 7 by tony weeg posted on 6/15/2004 at 4:36 AM

ray, i made one for navtrak, its pretty cool, allows for multiple users to be added to a project, with some role based security (almost done) that allows for READ-ONLY, Commentable, OWNER roles, anyway you can add users to a project, then within the project assign action items, action items are commentable, there are also varying status.

its cool.

if you want to check it out, let me know, ill get it together to show ya.

Comment 8 by Anthony posted on 6/15/2004 at 10:54 AM

We have made an application ("TreePlanner") that we use to keep track of our projects. It is made entirely in flash and it has been nominated as a finalist to the flashforward film festival in the application category. Vote for it! :)

http://www.flashforwardconf...{686AD28E-D923-4111-B816-6CF057513994}

It's the first one on the right.

Comment 9 by Darren Walker posted on 6/15/2004 at 11:30 AM

Anthony, that TreePlanner application is cool. Really really cool. Are you guys selling it?

Comment 10 by Alistair Moffatt posted on 6/15/2004 at 12:21 PM

I don't know if this is possible, but how about using FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com) to manage the synchronisation between your laptop and desktop.

I use it successfully to keep three machines in sync and find it especially useful to keep my FeedDemon cache synchronised to allow me to view my feeds from my desktop or my laptop as required.

Comment 11 by Raymond Camden posted on 6/15/2004 at 1:57 PM

Guys, thanks for the recommendations. I think I like MasterList - although it is a bit too task oriented... which would seem like a good thing, but I wish it would allow for me to assign both simple notes _and_ task items to a project. So, for example, on a project I have a task to setup the new web server. I'd like to add a note that includes the login info for the server. I can add that as comments to the task, but I really want it as a separate note so I can access it later.

Comment 12 by Nathan Dintenfass posted on 6/15/2004 at 3:19 PM

You might check out Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/pro..., especially if you use Subversion for your version control. It has an integrated Wiki, which is made for the kind of random notes you are talking about, as well as a great Timeline/Source Browser against your Subversion repository and a standard "Ticket" system that you can assign to team members. As a manager it's also cool because you can get an RSS feed of the timeline.

Comment 13 by Scott Fitchet posted on 6/17/2004 at 6:03 PM

I've always thought a wiki environment would be a good platform for project management / software dev but haven't used one for this yet.

Scrum might be worth investigating for ideas ...
http://scrum.minty.org/

Comment 14 by Alex Aguilar posted on 6/19/2004 at 11:58 PM

www.taskspro.com / $125 / 5 users / php+mysql
www.fogbugz.com / $99 / 2 users / asp+sqlserver

neither are true project management apps but they work pretty well, are easy-to-install and don't hurt the wallet too bad.

Comment 15 by David Foltz posted on 6/20/2004 at 1:59 AM

Yesterday I rediscovered http://davidcrow.ca and his wonderful collection of thoughtful blog entries. He has a couple entries that are relevant to this discussion.

Project Tracking Tools, Redux
http://tinyurl.com/3ywy2

Project Management Tools
http://tinyurl.com/yquwe

Comment 16 by doug posted on 7/6/2004 at 4:11 PM

I've been using ToDoList...nothing super special, but does what I need and extracts to HTML automagically.

http://www.thecodeproject.c...

mentioned on /. even
http://ask.slashdot.org/ask...

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