Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Res: Project Management Capability in OpenACS?
Malte is right. We've got a GanttProject integration working in our recent V3.2.Beta1 release of ]project-open[. Please check our SourceForge site http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/ and check the "Support Files" section (not the main download section!) for the beta release. It also comes with a PostgreSQL dump for Pg 8.0.1 for a jump-start. I'm not sure whether we've GPLed the stuff or not, but you can go grab it, adapt it to Project Manager, and release the result under the GPL.
However, I'm not sure that it's going to be a big help. Creating and parsing GanttProject's XML is actually quite straight forward. But we had to modify the semantics of our Project/Subproject/Tasks hierarchical structure to deal with a lot of semantic differences. For example, GanttProject allows you to "fully delete" a task, while there may still be timesheet information, discussions or invoices associated with it.
chances are he is going to do the same thing most other
projects are and just spit out a graphic gantt display.
Hi Robert. (Un-?)Fortunately, that's not the case. We found in usability tests that "normal" project managers (without previous exposure to OpenACS 😊) were unable to maintain a "normal" project structure (a few tenth of tasks) using a Web interface. Also, we've seen negative feedback that dotProject got for its Gantt integration. It's basicly useless for real companies and has been named by several customers as a reason not to go with dotProject.
This is why we went for the integrated GanttProject Java application. Still, I've heard from customers that it's difficult to do any serious resource planning with it. Maybe we should go and integrate some kind of Excel sheet... Maybe somebody has seen a reasonable Spread Sheet applet, please?
* Project Charter
* Budget
* Risks
* Issues Log
* Work Breakdown Structure
* Roles and Responsibilities
* Assumptions & Constraints
* Communication Plan
We've got basicly all of that, plus "project controlling" (using a "compound cost model" to calculate profit & loss for each project), "resource planning" (with the final V3.2 release) and "reporting" (a kind of Crystal Reports with grouped reports and a reporting engine).
Admittedly, most of the stuff above is not GPLed, but provided under a free (as in beer) license. Please see my posting history for in-dept discussions and opinions from leading OpenACS community members about it. We are trying to go a "middle way", with a professional product-development pipeline while still upholding the ideas behind open-source.
Reporting is even commercial software, as well as a GAAP/IAS compliant auditing, a SAP interface and a number of other packages that are only useful for companies with 50+ employees. And frankly, I don't feel bad to charge these companies a license fee. They would be very surprised if we wouldn't, and probably wouldn't trust us. The first Fortune-1000-subsidy customers have gone live with ]po[ recently and they praise our model as a reasonable mix suitable for both small and big companies.
So, I would encourage everybody to have a look at our stuff and check it out. For an end-user it feels like real open-source software with community, patches, free extensions, etc. And as a consultant/integrator (somebody who needs to squeeze money out of a customer...) you may appreciate the professional product and our support that's going to open you a lot of doors.
Cheers,
Frank
mailto:frank_dot_bergmann@project_dash_open.com
http://www.project-open.com/
