Do project management apps help productivity?

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

and backend is based on smarty, which should be a bonus considering it’s the default template engine for Revolution there should be less learning time).

That’s just for the Revo manager. Has nothing to do with front end sites.

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

A peek behind the scenes would be hugely useful and we’d love to take you up on that!

I know it’s only for the manager Ryan (and I should be careful to be specific each time around, one wouldn’t want to mislead newbies), but ActiveCollab is "all manager" since it’s only a backend app (except the public ticket feature which is outside the backend). My point was if you’ve toyed with Revo’s manager you benefit from the same template engine with aC.

I had some adjusting to do with the MVC logic to understand where is what but once you get your bearings it’s very consistent. As for smarty, it’s pretty straightforward.

For a peek behind the scene, check your PM box

Thanks David.

Yeah Im in the BC camp too. Keep thinking to roll my own, but 37signals just keeps it running. I really like how i dont have to worry about maintenance, upgades, etc. The Saas works really well here- I want to manage the work not for project management to be the work.

There are some pretty interresting stuff going on @ a51 which could extend/complement ActiveCollab in a very interresting way... wait and see !

Now that is really cool ... something that was on the list of things to do for our theoretically ideal business/project management tool!

Too bad they are not open source anymore. Based on how they dumped all over their original community, which they originally promised that they would never do, and now they currently promise a life time of perpetual use on the single fee. I just cannot trust that they will not screw all their users again on a whim. Based on this fear I cant trust my data to their system, and in the way that more eggs will be in this one basket I need to trust the system (I believe that a reputation is an important factor in doing business).

Anyway, they have a great product and I wish them the best. Meanwhile I’ll wait for the clone or use something else.

BTW - custom forms were part of the original open source version, but had never evolved beyond existing functions (tasks, projects).

I can understand your concern, but I think the open source to commercial transition was handled badly, and things would have been very different if the basic version had remained open source. I don’t think they dumped on their community. They revised their copy when shields raised by making the source code open and lowering rates.

To me, aC very much akin to another nice app’, Expression Engine.

My take on this is, there is no open source alternative and I don’t see one happen in the near future. ProjectPier is very far behind and Collabtive is way too simplistic at the moment (this has to be watched, I have hope the plugins will appear and make it up to par).

As I said to Ryan, there are very few apps holding their own against Basecamp and none that can handle internationalisation, which for lots of us is really a must have since we can’t force clients to use english. ActiveCollab 0.7.x was nice, 1.x is really a lot of improvement and has changed the way I organize my work and follow up of time and cost. The only alternative is a hosted service named taskii, which looks so much like ActiveCollab 0.7.x mixed with 1.x UI that I wonder what is the codebase behind the hosted platform...

I never have heard about custom forms back when I was running 0.7.x but I didn’t try to customize back then... I think the new product goes way beyond custom forms. We shall see but whatever the past mistakes I have no doubt about the a51 team coding skills nor about their knack for designing great UIs.

We shall see...

Honestly, I don’t see how they can survive on a $300 license cost for lifetime support and upgrades. Is that really true? If so then a HUGE red flag is raised; are any of the key files encrypted with the commercial license?

I didn’t see anything about a lifetime support/upgrade option... from their pricing page:

Support and Upgrades $399 initial cost then $199/year, first year is free $199 initial cost then $99/year, first year is free  (corporate and small business, respectively)

I’m on the fence with AC, have been ever since they changed business models. It does look very nice tho and I’m continuing to keep an eye on it...