Do project management apps help productivity?

Storing you (and your client’s) data is something I don’t feel as strongly as some might but I am happy to store projects informations on my side.

I have a dedicated box with a daily backup on a backup server which I then back up locally on a RAID drive. I burn DVDs regularly on top of that. Of course those company probably have better safeguards but I don’t like the idea of important files being stored on a hosted service...

Quote from: davidm at Mar 28, 2008, 08:03 PM

I have a dedicated box with a daily backup on a backup server which I then back up locally on a RAID drive. I burn DVDs regularly on top of that. Of course those company probably have better safeguards but I don’t like the idea of important files being stored on a hosted service...

You may call me obsessed, but i store on both sides

Yeah well, I might use some server disk space to store backups too... never too careful

Quote from: sottwell at Mar 28, 2008, 05:09 PM

Call me paranoid, but that just bothers me for a lot of reasons.

You’re paranoid, but I learned a long time ago that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get you (they are; they told me so).

Not having a local backup of anything important (email, project management, etc.) would be a non-starter to me. If I can’t store and access the data on my own machine, I don’t trust it. I’ve worked at companies that went under and everything went poof overnight, so I know it can happen when you least expect it.

I’d definitely prefer installing ProjectPier on one of our hosts than use a service like BaseCamp for security/paranoia reasons. I’d know I’d have accessible backups of the data, and at least I’d be aware of what steps I’d taken to keep it secure. It would also have a lower profile than a popular service would, which would probably keep the hack attempts to a minimum.

I’m also a bit disturbed over the government snoops prying into everybody’s business for no particular reason. I and my clients would not be too happy if everything I did got loaded into some alphabet soup’s database because somebody doesn’t like the politics of one of the employees of one of my clients and goes after every ISP, hosting company, phone company, and anything else they can dig up about them and everybody connected to them. War on drugs, homeland security, "think of the children", and they’re doing it with and without subpoenas and with non-disclosure orders, so it could happen and I’d never even know it. I mean, even Rackspace rolled over and handed over a couple of UK servers on order of a Texas judge on the request of an Italian government agency a few years ago.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/21/google_subpoena_roils_the_web/
http://www.news.com/Police%20blotter%20Judge%20orders%20Gmail%20disclosure/2100-1047_3-6050295.html?tag=nefd.top

@ZAP : Until ProjectPier is something more than a 0.7.1 clone with no improvement, it falls short in several areas in my opinion one of them being GUI and that’s one of the reasons my client did not adopt it at the time. On the opensource front I’d rather check what the guys from Collabtive are doing. They have a young product, and not many features but it’s seems well thought out and hold some promise.

@Susan : I agree that trend is scary and personnally, I am happy to live in France in this regard (though things are evolving in a bad direction since we elected our new president, Sarkozy ) I hope inititiative like TOR will grow and allow people a certain level of anonymity.

I just installed taskfreak. It is pretty simple, but I figured it’s a good place for me to begin (not to mention being free). I’m doing a few websites for a friend, and this way we can keep track of what’s going on and what needs to be done.

I think later on I’ll dig around and find a Mac app that will suit using bonjour. That way I can keep it on my own local machine. (did I say I’m paranoid? )

Thanks for the tip on Collabtive, it is a little ’young’ at the moment but does show great promise. The UI is very simple for now, needs a bit of work. I will keep an eye on this one.

Collabtive and Task Freak both look useful. I’m looking for something a bit more feature-rich for group collaboration, however. Ideally I’d like it to have a shared file repository, wiki, and some CRM capabilities (and I want it to be free and open source).

Fortunately I’m in no rush to find this mythical application...

@Susan: Nowadays you pretty much have to assume that anything you put on a server unencrypted is no longer private. The only way to use collaborative software like this with any measure of information security would be to host it on a hardened local server and require SSL to connect to it. I still keep local text logs for each project I work on (plus KeePassX for passwords and GPG-encrypted credit card numbers) - they’re not fancy but they’ve never failed me yet.

FYI - I have been investigating the ProjectPier project and it is actually a big improvement from the last ActiveCollab release. There are several bug fixes. They are also in development with a plug-in system and a time tracking implementation (no release date yet but looks promissing). In the mean time I found a post with a great TimeTracking hack that works great. I have installed it locally for now but will test it during the following weeks. You can download it at this post in the forum:
http://projectpier.org/node/259#comment-1123

I am very pleased with this hack so far and have found a new appreciation for the ProjectPier brach of AC. It is worth checking out locally (not in production). Attached is a screen shot of it in action.

I am happy Too bad the code for AC/PP is so complicated, sure makes it difficult to enhance on my own.