Project Management + SCM for techies and non-techies?

Question

Hello,

I've recently begun evaluating a few project management projects for the company I work for. It's the classic case - growing company looking for the right solution (meaning, free or really cheap). It's a combination shop - Windows, Macs, and Linux on the desktop. The tech savviness, of course, ranges from newbie to unix guru.

I have yet to find anything really close to a total solution. I don't expect to find one, but I am looking for suggestions/guidance/any sort of feedback based on people's experience.

What I'm looking for:

• web based
• methodology independent (not looking for an agile solution, etc.)
• free or really cheap
• document management
• timelines and milestones
• task tracking and assigning
• reporting
• source control
• development wiki

I've looked at Trac, Projectivity, Basecamp, JIRA, RT, XPlanner, and SharedPlan. I've stayed away from Bugzilla due to previous unhappy experiences with it. None of these things really does everything - some are extendable, but I'd check here before going down that path.

Thanks,

Answer 1

i have a similar problem, looked hard at alfresco and joomla.

none met my needs because i wanted the ultimate in simplicity. but you seem to prefer having the kitchen sink included, (while keeping it easy to use, i guess), so either one of these might be right for you.

currently, i'm throwing together my own (using Django, of course), keeping only the project-deadline, forum and file-versioning concepts.

Answer 2

Have a look at Redmine, it's a Rails app. Haven't used it yet myself, but thinking about moving to it from activecollab. This applications seems to be evolved quite fast last year.

Answer 3

Read through Edward Tufte's long-running Ask E.T. topic Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts). There is no consensus answer, but a lot of things have been evaluated.

link text

Answer 4

My experience of Jira (with Confluence for the wiki) has been rather good, although it is quite pricey the support people were very responsive and helpful. The place where I used that had svn for version control, and the two played together OK. On the other hand I found Xplanner to be a very odd app - really inflexible if you don't want to be doing XP, and surprisingly documentation-centric for an XP shop.

Answer 5

Trac - integration of tickets / wiki / commit-comments is great.

Caveat: installation can be PITA...

Answer 6

Check out Jira Studio. All of Atlassian's apps, hosted for you.

http://www.jira.com/

You get wiki/tracker/svn browser and more.

Answer 7

If you don't mind doing a bit of configuration yourself and have a windows server somewhere in your shop then you could set up your very own customized project management system in SharePoint.

* web based
* methodology independent 
* free or really cheap
* document management
* timelines and milestones
* task tracking and assigning
* reporting
* source control
* development wiki

The source control system is not a part of SharePoint so it is really a question whether that requirement is paramount or not. But besides that you will have all of the above for free if you install WSS (comes free with a 2003/2008 server) There is even a book from O'Reilly about how to set up a PMIS in SharePoint

Answer 8

I think Xplanner is good for your purposes. The new XPlanner is even better: XPlanner-Plus is an open source project management tool.

Answer 9

One solution for the more visual of us would be to use Drupal 6x. with the Project and Subversion (now Version Control) modules. I prefer Joomla with ProjectFork, but until its modded with a repo browser, this will have to do.

Hope this helps.

http://drupal.org/project/project