Do project management apps help productivity?

And the file upload and time tracker plugins for taskfreak work just fine, although it did take a couple of installations to get them installed in the correct order; some of them will step on the others if they’re installed after. I had to do some reading on the forums to get it all working together nicely.

Yep, TF is great. Time Clock is a wonderful little plugin as this others too: import/export from csv and excel, email notifications, deadline extender and percentage status bar. It has lots of great capabilities in a small package. Installation is nice via the plugin manager but there was a lot of work changing the permissions of many files to make it work. Once that is solve, the plugins work flawlessly.

Some very cool new modules are coming up for ActiveCollab :

1. Incoming Mail - This module connects to any number of POP3 or IMAP servers and imports emails from them. What this module enables you is to have people post new tickets or discussions directly from their email client. Also, when user replies to notification sent from activeCollab it gets automatically fetched and submitted as a comment.

2. Invoicing - Prepare and send invoices from activeCollab to your clients. This module also enables you to track all the payments made by your clients for any particular invoice. Multi-currency and multi tax rates support included.

3. SVN integration - This module lets you connect existing SVN repositories to activeCollab projects. You can browse both code and repository history. Module sends email notifications on new commits to people who subscribe to repositories.

Check http://www.activecollab.com/forums/topic/3180/1/

I currently have a hybrid "project management" system that’s working very well for me:

To-Do list: todoist.com (I only need to view and manage this myself, and it’s just the next action item list)

Project Logs: SMF (I installed private forums on a server, and I have a board for each client/project; whenever I do any work on a project or take notes related to it, I do it as a reply to the project thread so that it’s always accessible and searchable from anywhere)

Invoices: Bamboo Invoices (once I customized this to my liking, it was perfect for me - and it’s free)

I’ve tried to use several project management systems to coordinate work among different people working on a project, but so far none of them has convinced me (lately I’ve had a good experience with a shared Google Doc with a project outline and assigned tasks, perhaps because it’s intuitive to most people).

The latest feature addition to Basecamp has once again kept it in the running. Being able to comment on To Dos and milestones, rather than being forced to keep each discussion in the messages section is a huge productivity boon. Basecamp still isn’t perfect but for the price and working well with clients and your team it’s tough to beat.

ActiveCollab can’t do that... you can comment files but not task or milestone. You can link from task to discussion though, it’s been a welcome addition.

Commenting on task and todos is a nice feature Ryan and I’ll try to get this one added to ActiveCollab (given the rate of improvement, wouldn’t be surprised if this happened). Not sure this will make it since Tickets (basically, extended tasks) can do that, Ilija might tell me to use tickets for complex tasks which require debating... we’ll see.

Anyway remember that BaseCamp (unless it has AT LAST hit the guys @37signals that internationalization could be of value to their product) is english only and that is a killer argument in favor of ActiveCollab at least for us who work with non english speaking clients

How such visionnaries can lack interrest for "non english speaking market" is beyond my understanding (I had contacted them by email over 2 years ago about translating in french for them, but never had any reply)... or else they think interresting clients all speak english ?

Basecamp just keeps barely adding enough features just in the nick of time to keep me from developing my own...

ActiveCollab is close, but in order to make it work for our needs would require a similar amount of hacking and then we’d be stuck with no upgrade path.

Hmmm.... I guess since it’s hosted, you can’t hack Basecamp...

ActiveCollab’s code is clean (at least to my less than php savvy’s eyes... I made enough sense of it to hack the core back when i18n was not implemented) and there is a plugin architecture (now, it’s based on MVC you either like it or not but I find it’s easy to make sense of it... and backend is based on smarty, which should be a bonus considering it’s the default template engine for Revolution’s manager there should be less learning time).

I don’t think it would take that much work... I can give you access to my aC install to give you a look at the code behind the app if you want
About upgrade path if you dig into aC’s API you should be alright with anything you add on top of aC’s core. Now, a coder should give a look at this and check what my intuition says

Quote from: davidm at Sep 15, 2008, 03:17 PM

About upgrade path if you dig into aC’s API you should be alright with anything you add on top of aC’s core.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I’m finding my SMF project logs are really useful for. If I hack something into software, I make a note of exactly what I did in that project’s log (with file names, etc.). Then later on if there’s a major update or I want to do the same thing on another server I can search the logs and see what I changed.

I couldn’t find any web-based software that was designed to do what I wanted, but SMF is working pretty well so far.

I do the same with aC, I think any tool which help you document is good for productivity, my take on this is the tool you use to document has to be the same you use to manage projects. I couldn’t work without time tracking too, it’s integrated so well into the app that I really DO track my time and then it’s easier to pitch sells and defend your rates...

It’s also a great way to keep a centralized history for a given project, and this can come in handy to budget future project or to answer to any claim from the client should it arise...