What is Project Management or Collaboration Software?
There are basically two types of online Project Management applications that can be accessed and utilised with any compatible web browser.
1. Traditional project planning software that is ideally suited to manage engineering and construction projects. A feature of this type of software is a Ghantt chart.
2. Collaboration software that focuses on milestones, tasks, document tracking and billing. This software tracks business workflow and is primarily designed for sharing information as well as workflow management.
Benefits
For a SME owner the benefits of project and collaboration software reside in real time access to information and for managing workflow.
1. Access
The main selling point for these tools is that all you need is an Internet connection to access your project information. Accessing the status of a project from anywhere, at any time, and online allows for better resource management including scheduling employees and subcontractors, tracking production schedules and the early identification of potential budget overruns.
Multiple users (such as subcontractors and even clients) can access the system from anywhere through a web browser. Furthermore, multiple people can access and modify the same information simultaneously, so there's no confusion about which version of a document is the most recent.
2. Managing Workflow
The ability to capture, organise and manage the workflow of a business from one central place appeals to most managers and business owners. Even better, dashboards and email reports identify late tasks, changes to documents and projects lagging behind schedule.
This reporting allows managers to better align time, effort and energy with the most important business priorities so you can focus the business on what really matters.
3. Billing
More recently collaboration software has included modules for tracking billable hours. This functionality is especially useful for professional and service based businesses. Even better you can print invoices from within some collaborative software solutions and integrate the billable hours with popular accounting software such as Quickbooks.
Open Source Software Applications
There is a plethora of traditional project management applications and of these dotProject is the most widely used open source software solution.
When it comes to collaboration software there are many hosted solutions that charge a business ongoing service fees. For a small to medium size business these fees are expensive and a barrier to utilizing collaboration software. Also you can spend several weeks trying to weed through and evaluate all of these applications to find what is the best fit for your business.
Here is some good news. Open Source IT have tried most of the major open source collaborative software solutions and only one really stacks up in our opinion. Open Source IT can install the software on your server as well as provide hosting, help desk and training support services.
Our project management solution is both low cost and web-based. It's also iPhone enabled.
