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M2: Analysis of Comparable Project Planning/Management Offerings

M2 Section Summary: Subjective Impressions

Copyright (c) 2000 Jim Salmons and Frank Castellucci
All Rights Reserved

Associated project: Specification Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software

Project URL: http://sohodojo.com/techsig/project-planning-project.html

sXc Project detail: http://sourcexchange.com/ProjectDetail?projectID=24 (SourceXchange is out of business.)

Project coordination: Sohodojo

Sponsors: Position open

Sponsors (M1-3): 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:

Note: The HTML versions of the deliverable use bullet lists with more readable prefix identifiers than the two-character source identifier used in the text versions.

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 ======

15 Subjective Impressions

15.1 User Interface: Strengths/Weaknesses

  • Enact Enterprise System [ Full data ]

    The 4.0 release of the Netmosphere products are now known as Enact Enterprise System. This latest release is a leap ahead in terms of component integration and easy of use. However, Java-based user interfaces still suffer the 'more of the look and less of the feel' syndrome. Full keyboard interaction is not possible which affects Enact's accessibility rating.

    The 'multi-widget' listbox line items are handled well. They pack a lot of user interface functionality in a small space without getting 'too tight'.

  • eProject Express [ Full data ]

    The vCard and vCalendar export feature is a nice unobtrusive 'value-add'.

    The assignment of Person/Users to Tasks, Events and Documents uses a nice pop-up and select one-or-more Person/Users interface.

    The Documents interface is simple and effective.

    Overall, this is a good example of how well a 'back to basics' approach to interface design can improve an offering.

  • FastTrack Schedule [ Full data ]

    The direct manipulation interfaces and the time-data editing and display features of FTS are superb.

  • ManagePro [ Full data ]

    It is getting dated a bit by today's standards, but ManagePro is an excellent example of a highly customizable packaged, commercial application. In its time, ManagePro respected and catered to the customer's interest and desire to have 'just the right tool'... to have the 'tool meet the customer' rather than require that the customer adopt the mindset and method of the tool.

    While most applications limit users to configuring aggregation views such as tabular data windows, ManagePro provides a 'wrench' tool that these each User customize all views, including item-specific editors. These view customizations can be shared with other users or keep for 'my way' personalizations. The reviewers direct experience has been that this is one of the most powerful 'success factor' features when getting new users to accept the system. ManagePro views and 'become' what is comfortable and intuitive to the new user.

    A particularly clever status reporting user interface technique in ManagePro is the 'red-yellow-green' color-coded traffic light cross-tab cells and tree-view nodes which give valuable 'head-up view' visualizations of various dimensions of project status. In the hierarchical tree views, these 'status-aware' nodes aggregate the state of their subordinate node states. This can be a powerful user interface metaphor for end-used configuration of complex status reporting computations.

  • Microsoft Project 2000 and Project Central [ Full data ]

    The variety of interfaces (web based, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office based) will fit most peoples needs or tastes, and that the web interface is fully configurable, there is nothing but strength in this product.

  • Opendesk.com [ Full data ]

    In all fairness, Opendesk is NOT a Project Management/Project Planning offering. It is focused and geared at providing some workflow management applications for a small business concern. It would be unfair to judge those characteristics in this forum.

  • SourceForge [ Full data ]

    Reasonable for the functionality and model it represents.

  • WebProject [ Full data ]

    While I had some trouble getting the correct JVM mix on my machine, once that was done the product worked like a charm. I am convinced that if anyone is really serious about providing enterprise strength, distributed, culturally sensitive tools, than they must rely on and take advantage of client side processing with a minimal disruption to the user.

  • X-Community [ Full data ]

    If Mac and Unix plug-ins were equally available and functional, this would be a compelling candidate for a 'real project short list' of web-based team collaboration services.

    The plug-in gives a 'best of both worlds' interface. Much of the interactive interface is browser-based. But a number of the complex data manipulation dialogs are rendered using 'client native' widgets and windows. This gives the X-Community user interface a usability that feels like you could use on a real project.

    The X-Community 'plug in' is not 'browser-bound'. There is a System Tray interface that gives X-Community feature access. In this case, the 'native' dialog interfaces can be accessed without needing to be in a browser-based interaction to initiate that access.

    As with any web-based service, user interface connection speed and reliability will have a great impact.

15.2 Project Modeling: Strengths/Weaknesses

  • Enact Enterprise System [ Full data ]

    No comments.

  • eProject Express [ Full data ]

    Realistically, the Task features of the current Express release are so limited that it is not a practical solution for 'real world' complex projects.

    The Document system is a good example of 'simple and practical' design.

  • FastTrack Schedule [ Full data ]

    As I said before, FTS's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Its design-point of intuitive, ease of use has been achieved by very deliberately placing important project dynamics 'below the radar' (outside the implemented problem model space). The lack of first class Person, Role, Organization, Group, Resources and similar model elements reduces the potential of FTS as a 'dynamic teaming collaboration platform'.

    What is does do, FTS does very well with a 'ruthless simplicity' true to its design.

  • ManagePro [ Full data ]

    The lack of Goal/Subgoal dependencies constraints is the biggest missing piece in ManagePro. ManagePro is designed to be a collaboration management environment which is goal-directed and performance-oriented. Since it is not intended to be a Project Management tool, per se, this shortcoming is understandable.

  • Microsoft Project 2000 and Project Central [ Full data ]

    While what is available is the best you can get, the lack of Requirements Engineering and Post Mortem analysis functions require enablement work after the installation.

  • Opendesk.com [ Full data ]

    No comments.

  • SourceForge [ Full data ]

    Project Modeling, or the lack there-of, is it's weakness.

  • WebProject [ Full data ]

    From a full SDLC aspect, there was much to be desired in the lack of Role Modeling, Requirements Engineering, Implementation and Maintenance configuration management, and documentation/content management.

    Clearly the muscle in this product is its painstaking detail to Collaboration and Project Planning.

  • X-Community [ Full data ]

    The X-Community offering is an innovative solution. By partnering with Microsoft, X-Collaboration Software Corporation has strategically 'adopted' the 'market-leader/best-of-breed' MS Project 2000 product offering into its offering. For its part, X-Collaboration designed the 'parallel world' model of the Information Units 'work product'-centric X-Community offering. X-Collaboration then did its hard work tightly integrating MS Office and MS Project applications into their model space.

    I'd need some extended, practical experience to have a more informed opinion. But from what I have seen, this is a leading, innovative offering.

15.3 Technology Platform: Strengths/Weaknesses

  • Enact Enterprise System [ Full data ]

    No comments.

  • eProject Express [ Full data ]

    Although it is very limited in its design scope, eProject Express is 'back to basics' simple and portable. No plug-ins. No platform-specific stuff.

  • FastTrack Schedule [ Full data ]

    No Unix. But the Windows and Mac support is top notch. AEC is walking a fine line between having transparent file-access across Windows and Mac platforms while also taking advantage of OS-specific extensions for such technologies as object linking and embedding (OLE).

  • ManagePro [ Full data ]

    Windows-only puts ManagePro in a (large) corner in today's increasingly heterogeneous computing world. The lack of support for Internet communication standards keeps ManagePro from competing in an increasingly web-based world. For ManagePro to become more than a niche 'software plus service' sale for PST, they will need to make ManagePro web-friendly. If they did that, developed some Application Service Provider partnerships and took another look at their multi-user pricing, PST might move ManagePro modern, competitive product/service offering.

  • Microsoft Project 2000 and Project Central [ Full data ]

    Both it's strength and weakness lie in the "Windows Only" mentality for the majority of functionality. But the accessability to the central server, being open, enables other technologies to participate in the organizations software development life cycle requirements.

  • Opendesk.com [ Full data ]

    No comments.

  • SourceForge [ Full data ]

    A full featured project management offering can not be accomplished with just PHP/HTML and a good RDBMS. It requires intelligent objects that can maintain state, respond to events and changes, and acknowledge dynamic domain constraints.

  • WebProject [ Full data ]

    The use of Java shows a great strength in the project team at WebProject. It significantly reduces the installation and configuration nightmare when addressing a global, culturally diverse world.

  • X-Community [ Full data ]

    This is a classic paradox; X-Community's platform requirements and preferences are both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The tight integration with MS Project with its 'work product'-oriented shared Workspaces is a both a practical and innovative offering. But any platform alignment is going the slice the world along a 'haves and have-not' or some form of 'love-hate' dimension. As they say, you can't please everyone.

    Fortunately, the platform bias can be remedied by the introduction of Macintosh and Unix plug-ins to include these OS users into the potential user pool.

15.4 Overall 'Wow' factor: 1 (low) to 5 (high)

15.5 Reviewer Comments

  • Enact Enterprise System [ Full data ]

    Enact is at version 4 level of maturity now. When it was first released, the Netmosphere offering was extremely innovative and relatively unique in the web-based project management marketplace. But the last year has seen a lot of competitor developments that place the Enact system in a more crowded marketspace.

    Generalizing and extending its email features into a User personalization feature would be helpful.

    Also, the association between a Task and 'Domain Object' resources needed to do that Task are a bit weak. You cannot directly attach linked resources (URLs, files, pointers to other Projects) to Tasks. This is done by inserting a link into the text of the 'log-thread' Task Notes attribute. This relationship between Task-to-be-done and Stuff-needed-to-do-it should be more explicit and provide (modest) versioning features to increase the collaborative power of this offering.

    Despite these 'Wish List' items, Enact is an important entry in our comparables analysis. Enact has one of the richest Person/Role/Task-assignment underlying models of any of the offering we have looked at. The flexible Person/Role/Task mappings, supported by one-to-many and percent-involvement relationship attributes, allow a Project Planner to level of 'role-based abstraction' which is unique in this space.

  • eProject Express [ Full data ]

    The current eProject offering is essentially a 'placeholder' for this start-up to get into the marketplace. Clearly the next release will be critical to this company's competitive position.

    As a 'ruthlessly simple' take on project planning, however, there are lessons to be learned here in terms of doing the basics with no frills.

  • FastTrack Schedule [ Full data ]

    My 'three' WOW rating is a combination of way high ratings for UI ease of use and extension flexibility, tempered by frustration at the lack of first class User/Role model elements.

  • ManagePro [ Full data ]

    ManagePro is an ambitious product. It is so full of 'good and different' ideas that you can't help but be impressed. I rate it highly, not because it is the most capable and appropriate choice for a project planning/management solution. Rather, I rate it highly for all the innovative things the design team brought into a product that truly is a 'horse of a different color'.

    Too often, folks go looking for a project management tool when what they need are some tools to help the overall structure and implementation of a team of folks that share a goal-oriented, performance-oriented work world, like sales or personnel where discrete projects are not the norm. In these situations, a product like ManagePro can be a 'better fit' than a project management tool.

    But when conventional project planning and management is required, expect to look to solutions which are designed to these more conventional requirements.

  • Microsoft Project 2000 and Project Central [ Full data ]

    No comment

  • Opendesk.com [ Full data ]

    In all fairness, Opendesk is NOT a Project Management/Project Planning offering. It is focused and geared at providing some workflow management applications for a small business concern. It would be unfair to judge those characteristics in this forum.

  • SourceForge [ Full data ]

    While the body of this analysis would suggest that SourceForge is sub-standard in regards to SDLC functionality requirements, it should not be dismissed as being without value.

    SourceForge was one of the first available resources open to the public, and specifically geared at supporting the Open Source developer. At the time, the open source developer could only be described as the part-time, add code where I can, devoted, and distributed individual. In this regard, SourceForge is unequaled. The collaborative mechanisms fit nicely with the current mailing-list or off host chat discussions to synchronize efforts.

    SourceForge has done a good job at addressing the tools required for implementation and maintenance of project code, keystones of the Open Source movement, and in this regards it's features must be considered as valuable in a full life cycle suite offering. We must never loose sight that there is a reason for a project plan, and that is to develop, build, and deliver software.

    A recent "bell" that was added, and has significant value in the open source evolution, is the Jobs Board. Project administrators can post a "help wanted" here for almost every skill set. This is a great gateway to get more then just the "developer" involved in open source projects.

  • WebProject [ Full data ]

    No comments.

  • X-Community [ Full data ]

    I want to 'kick the tires' on this offering with some real world project experience. The underlying model, together with the MS Project integration, is sufficiently innovative that past experience and assumptions can't tell you whether it would be a comfortable 'personal fit' or not. An 'immersion experience' would be needed to develop a better appreciation for the thought and design behind this offering.

DOCUMENT HISTORY

Version 0.9 - Draft
Version 1.0 - Final

### end of sxc24-m2-02sect-comparables.txt (Version 1.0) ###


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