Do you manage a lot of projects to? My projects seemed to be growing in scope taking over my life lately. Between contest deadlines, managing writers, mastering C#, and juggling home life I couldn’t manage to keep things organized organized in my head anymore. I needed help in the form of project management software and fast but past experience told me the options I had were pretty grim.
I had explored project management software in the past (about a year ago I am guessing) but none of them met my needs. The first one I looked at was the Quicken Project management add on. It seemed to work but since it was desktop based and I move around a lot it just wasn’t going to work. The open source solutions I tried were, as most open source projects are, clunky and had interfaces designed by programmers. Clunky interfaces are fine if you want to sit around and figure it out but I don’t have the luxury anymore. Lastly I tried Basecamp and it was pretty good until I read the forums, posted a feature request, and read what everyone else had to say about them.
Frankly the Basecamp guys are a bunch of assholes in my opinion.
Fast forward to a few days ago.. were I was forced to find a solution… and I came across a new player, GoPlan.info. It has a pretty nice the UI is simple and lightweight and its not weighed down by unnecessary features, exactly what people like about Basecamp. The pricing plan is affordable and gradually goes up depending in the amount of projects you need. Also it has the ability to issue trouble tickets, assign them to a user, and track them which I really like. Of course since its web based course the you can get to it from anywhere.
There are a few problems though.. its a tad slow.. but I expect that to be fixed… they did just get started. Also I there is no way at the moment to export projects ( ie to a spread sheet or xml file). Personally I want to be able to free my data and save it locally if need to. Some of these problems have been pointed out to them on their blog and you can see they deal with criticism well. Even when they disagree with the customer they do so in a manner that is civil and polite.
Which really leads to the killer feature of GoPlan.info…
Its not Basecamp
Popularity: 5% [?]
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