Project Management with activeCollab
We’ve been looking for a good way to manage the myriad of projects we’ve been working on lately, with efforts spanning several clients, different developers, and all sorts of other complexity, and recently gave activeCollab a spin. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a great open source project management tool without a lot of the bloat (plus, it doesn’t have any of the restrictions found in BaseCamp, a tool we were also considering). I’ve been quite happy with it so far, though we’ve only just begun using it.
The idea is to allow access for many of our clients to the activeCollab portal throughout the relationship, making it easier for all of us to communicate progress. Of course, nothing will replace those good ol’ regular status reports, phone conferences, etc, but this gives clients a better understanding (and a more direct line of communication to developers) while working on their project.
My biggest concern going forward is keeping things fresh. We’ve tried using SugarCRM in the past to manage clients, contacts, projects, and other data, but it just wasn’t used as much as it could be (people just didn’t keep it updated or use it on a regular basis, myself included). Part of this could be due to it being a change in a regular routine, but I think there was something else. After all, we implemented a wiki based on MediaWiki after trying Sugar to great success. So I believe the main problem with Sugar was due to it being not quite what we needed. Incidentally, Sugar has an interesting project management module for the Sugar Enterprise product, though we’re not ready to make a purchase for a tool like this yet. Hopefully activeCollab will be a success.
