Award Sounds

I'm closely watching the forum relating to Web2Project, specifically the thread on Dependencies and Tasks Completion.

I was initially looking for an Open Source Project Management application and after trying a few, including stopping using OpenProj, I've found Web2Project as a good contender. It does have some issues though.

What do I like about it?

I like the activity in the forum.

For a start, there is activity in the forum. That makes a massive difference to any project. I see forum questions being answered whereas a lot of open-source (and even commercial product) forums leave questions empty for various reasons.

Secondly, the atmosphere on the forum is helpful and friendly. What I see from the forum over at Web2Project is that there are people involved who want to make the product work. More importantly, they acknowledge the product's deficiencies without attacking or talking down to forum visitors. That's a great sign.

It's web-based, so it means the Project Manager can create a project, tasks and assignments, and then the task assignees can log-in to update the task status. It will email the assignees and interested parties.

What don't I like about it?

Doesn't yet enforce dependency chains fully. That's important to me. From the conversations I've had, dependency chains are already mostly implemented (but only in the development versions). I haven't been able to check that due to software dependencies at my end.

It's difficult to create project templates. Say you have a number of projects that are similar in product, effort and duration, it makes sense to create one project plan and copy that to other projects. Actually that's possible in Web2Project. The problem I have is that the derived plans will have the same inherent errors from assumptions that the original plan did. I'm more interested in creating a plan, running with it and adding the additional tasks that crop up, then using that information for future plans. It's not the same as capturing actuals and using them. Very few plans survive implementation and it's those changes that I'd want to import into a new plan. I don't care about the actual dates. And that's the current problem with Web2Project, i.e. if you insert tasks from another project, then all the dates come across as well.

It doesn't implement resource levelling, either cross-project or internally to a given project. This isn't a show-stopper for me, but is important to see on the roadmap.

I'm not really sure about the project's roadmap, specifically which functionality fits in to which forthcoming release and how users can interact to ensure that their wishes are met. This is a common trait with open source projects. Fortunately the forum does show a lot of user discussion and maybe it's just that I've been focussed on a difficult topic.

Current Verdict

It's a good project to keep an eye on and it's a product I'd like to use in future. I'll only consider it once the dependency chain functionality has been fully tested and released. I don't believe it is useable in its current state for typical project management tasks, however there are a number of active users on the forums and they must be using it for managing projects. I look forwards to the forthcoming releases and may have to roll-up my sleeves and get more involved to get what I want out of it.