OpenProj: A Free, Open Source Challenge To Microsoft Project
Projity, a software-as-service (SaaS) firm announced a new free, open source version recently at LinuxWorld. OpenProj, as the new offering is called, is designed to be a free and open source replacement for Microsoft Project.
Microsoft Project is part of the company’s Office Suite, however it’s not bundled in Office 2007 and sells for $1,000 as a stand-alone app.
OpenProj is capable of reading Microsoft Project files and is available in Java which makes it cross-platform, something Microsoft Project is not.
Project management software is primarily geared at large enterprise companies and until recently, Microsoft Project was largely unchallenged in the field. But already Projity says that talks are underway with OpenOffice about integrating the new OpenProj into the OpenOffice suite.
The Projity team was kind enough to send me a demo version to play with and while I won’t pretend to understand everything OpenProj is capable of, I can say this — it’s fast. For a program of this bulk, written in Java I was expecting it to be dog slow, but it’s not.
Creating and assigning tasks is intuitive and straightforward and there’s a wealth of tracking options and views. Tasks can be filtered, prioritized and managed from just about any view.
Once you have your tasks set up, you can allocate “resources” to each task and even assign what percentage of the resource is applied to the task. Say you have a four day task with two people working on it. OpenProj assumes an 8-hour workday so that task would take two days to complete.
But what if one of those people is only working on the task half of the time? OpenProj allows you set each resource at a percentage and then recalculates the duration based on that information.
For the initial release, Projity will be offering English, French and Spanish versions of OpenProj but the company says it will have an additional 12+ languages available soon.
