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open source groupware: round three

January 4, 2006

netz

i now tested the following tools, some of them together with my boss and my coworker: PHProjekt, eGroupWare, Group-Office, dotProject, openPSA, webCollab, netOffice, phpGroupware and Achievo. there is no really feature balanced solution around which has good project management approaches and a working implementation of a stable reporting module (except for openPSA, this one is rather massive in all aspects. suddenly it requires midgaard application server to run as apache module. too bad i kicked that bsd server last month ..).

for now, i guess i will stop evaluating and wait for new releases that will hopefully cover our needs in the matter of project management in a more comfortable way. until then, my handwritten timetracking tool will still do a fine job. i’m also thinking about upgrading my existing tool with some more functionality (we used that in a productive environment for about 2 years - and it kinda worked), especially on the project management level.

tho, if you ask me which tool i’d use for project management, out of the box and with no big need to have lots of different and customisable reporting templates, i’d suggest either eGroupWare or PHProjekt. PHProjekt just looks extremely ugly. but i could live with that. thanks to style sheets.

a rather ironic sidenote is, that if i calculate the time i spent looking for this software on a monetary base, well .. i could have buyed already an entry level, full featured agency groupware. (i know that doesn’t really calculate well, but i don’t feel like being objective at the moment. ;) )