Make no mistake, there is no shortage of wickedly awesome project management apps. Basecamp appears to be the dominating force at the moment, but ActionMethod has made a strong showing. I’m on staff at North Point Ministries, and we’ve recently started evaluating ActiveCollab for web projects.
These are all excellent choices but they share one thing in common: the pay wall. If you really want to flex your project management muscles, you’re going to hit it early.
TeamLab, by comparison, is an open source competitor in this area.
The GPL license means it’s free. But another notable difference in TeamLab over the competition is that the makers, Ascensio System SIA, will host it for you as well. They provide the ability to spin up an instance on the Amazon cloud.
That’s handy.
It is missing a few things. Basecamp has an iPad client and excellent integration with 3rd party SaaS apps such as FreshBooks, TickSpot, and the like. ActionMethod has a rich desktop client that runs on Flex. I would love to see mobile clients available for TeamLab out of the box and the marketing literature doesn’t mention file uploads. Then again a DropBox account would fill that gap nicely.
Still, this product is GPL and looks like a solid offering for the budget conscious non-profit.
One other tool that deserves mention is Teambox. I like the social network feel to sharing team project information. http://teambox.com/
Haven’t heard of that one yet, thanks!
peace | dewde
hey, loved the teambox tool has become really useful and fun to use..definitely one to mention!
Hey guys,
I really feel like I’m missing out on something when it comes to project management. Chris, you said you guys use basecamp, I would love to see some real world examples of how it is used, especially in church world.
For example, would one project be some event coming up like a youth camp or LifeGroup launch? Could a project also be a new series? Or are those too broad and need to be narrowed down?
Anyways, I just thought it would make a great post/screencast if you guys shared with more details about using project management tools.
Btw – I recently installed Collabtive (http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/) on my server to play around with (free opensource). So far seems ok. Had a few bugs adding users but now it seems to be working.
Thanks and look forward to hearing from tips from you guys,
Tim Lemons
Tim:
Excellent question! I have tagged this idea for a future post. Thanks!
peace | dewde
Great find. I have been looking for something like this for a while. I do a lot of work for people in my church and love the idea of FREE project management. I too just found TeamBox about a week ago and it is pretty cool. I just got a team together using it for an upcoming event we are planning for next spring. This looks like something I will definitely look into using for my own development projects.
sweet!
peace | dewde