PROJECT PLANNING/MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW - SECTION SUMMARY SECTION: Multi-project Management Copyright (c) 2000 Jim Salmons and Frank Castellucci All Rights Reserved Associated project: "Specification Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software" (sXc ID: 24) Project URL: http://sohodojo.com/techsig/project-planning-project.html sXc Project detail: http://sourcexchange.com/ProjectDetail?projectID=24 Project coordination: SourceXchange Sponsors: Opendesk.com and Collab.Net Core Team: Jim Salmons and Frank Castellucci 1 Introduction This document aggregates the feature and underlying model analyses of comparable products and services in the domain of the project specification requirements. During the comparables analysis phase, nine product and service offerings were examined. 1.1 Format and Key to Abbreviations Each of fourteen sections of the Comparables Analysis Data Capture Outline has a Section Summary file such as this one. Section 1 of each data collection form is an Introduction statement explaining the project and the assessment. Section 16 is a reviewer profile. Since all data was produced by the core project team members, section 16 does not have a summary section. In a Section Summary file, we aggregate the analysis data within each subsection of the raw data collection forms. Each data point from the raw assessment outlines is presented in the following alphabetical order and prefixed with the following identifying abbreviations: EN - Enact Enterprise System 4.2 by Netmosphere/CriticalPath EP - eProject Express by eProject.com, Inc. FT - FastTrack Schedule 6.04 by AEC Software Inc. MP - ManagePro 4.0 by Performance Solutions Technology LLC MS - MS Project 2000 by Microsoft Corporation OD - Opendesk.com by HBE Software SF - SourceForge by SourceForge (VA Linux) WP - WebProject by Novient XC - X-Community by X Collaboration Software Corp. The aggregated section data in each Section Summary file is the last section of the file. In addition to the aggregated data, each summary file has an optional section for the capture of summary insights or comments. 1.2 Section Summary Insights and/or Comments ====== SECTION SUMMARY DATA ====== 13 Multi-project Management 13.1 Role Template library? ** EN ** Yes. While the Roles themselves are rather lightweight model elements, the readily accessible, global Role definition pool helps with enterprise/community-wide development of shared terminologies and workflow patterns. ** EP ** None. ** FT ** Not applicable. ** MP ** No. ** MS ** Resource pools are supported across the enterprise, and enable through Project Central. ** OD ** Functionality not supported. ** SF ** SourceForge has a system wide, hard-coded idea of the Roles involved in a project. Said roles include Administrator, Tools Administrator, Technician, Editor, and None. These assignments to an individual are on a per-project basis only. ** WP ** WebProject allows almost all elements of an existing project to templatized. This enable a high degree of re-use and time savings especially with multi-responsible teams and repetitive tasks structure. Users can be added to a resource pool. If there is a requirement that they have different access than their default profile, the administrator can assign which projects, by identifier, that they have additional capabilities on. ** XC ** A July 10th upgrade to the Knowledge and Project Management features of the X-Community offering has added a template feature with template library to capture and reuse project structures and, they say, processes. But these latest features were not available during the initial assessment. Regardless of the new template capability, it isn't a Role-based template system since X-Community does not explicitly model Roles within the Project model space. 13.2 Repetitive Task library? ** EN ** Not formally. But you can import a branch of Tasks into a Project. By collecting a Role-based selection of 'frequently used' interaction patterns, Enact users can obtain high degrees of productivity in Project Planning. ** EP ** None. ** FT ** Excellent. In this case, project templates are abundant and serve as helpful starting points for a wide variety of project types. ** MP ** A wide-ranging and helpful collection of 'starting point' template projects are provided. ** MS ** Task templates are support across the enterprise, and enable through Project Central. ** OD ** Functionality not supported. ** SF ** Functionality not supported. ** WP ** WebProject allows almost all elements of an existing project to templatized. This enable a high degree of re-use and time savings especially with multi-responsible teams and repetitive tasks structure. Project tasks can be saved to a Project template which allows re-use of the project structure (task elements, etc.). ** XC ** A July 10th upgrade to the Knowledge and Project Management features of the X-Community offering has added a template feature with template library to capture and reuse project structures and, they say, processes. But these latest features were not available during the initial assessment. 13.3 Reviewer Comments ** EN ** None ** EP ** This is VERY BASIC stuff in this release. ** FT ** None ** MP ** None ** MS ** Must have feature for every project management tool. ** OD ** None ** SF ** None ** WP ** The ability to support multiple projects, templates, and task libraries is a must have for every serious open community, open source project management effort. ** XC ** None DOCUMENT HISTORY Version 0.9 - Draft Version 1.0 - Final ### end of sxc24-02sect-comparables.txt (Version 1.0) ###