Enterprise level employee/planning/scheduling tool

Question

Hi everybody.

(I ask this here, waiting for the IT Admin StackOverflow to become reality!)

The IT Operations Dept of our company (media, about 4000 employees), is searching for a scheduling/planning tool.

Our requirements are:

• It should be Open Source software (highly preferred)
• It will be used by about 100 concurrent users, and the interface should be web based (highly preferred)
• It should have the ability to do employee level-planning (vacations, on call availability, scheduling, training, etc.) (mandatory)
• It should have the ability to schedule and track events (like Systems patching, maintenance, hardware upgrading, etc.) (mandatory)
• It may be used for other tasks, like budget planning&review, project scheduling, etc. (optional)

What product could meet the above requirements, in your experience?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

try OpenProj at http://openproj.org

Answer 2

http://www.freshbooks.com/

not exactly ...but might be worth a look

Answer 3

Try http://www.openworkbench.org/

Answer 4

I'll chime in another unhelpful suggestion:

http://trac.calendarserver.org/

Answer 5

Please check out Mylyn (http://tasktop.com/mylyn/) and Tasktop (http://tasktop.com/)

Answer 6

I would highly recommend you perform a little more analysis prior to proceeding, I've seen and heard of to many PM Tool initiatives that have failed because of the very reasons the company is looking to put one in place: lack of proper planning. I think you need to clearly define:

• all requirements and the priority need of each
• how the people are grouped and how each group will use the tool
• up time of the tool (is near 99% up time a critical concern?)
• how people will receive training on the tool
• how the tools infrastructure will be managed (support, backups, disaster recovery)
• what type of information will be maintained (documents, sensitivity of information, security levels)
• how the tool will be deployed (phases?)
• ongoing support handling/needs
• types of processes to be managed: software life cycles, bug tracking, maintenance, HR (hiring, etc.), media planning...and a template/standard for each life cycle

There's probably some additional points..but I think that's a start. Also, you'll probably find that the above items, especially training, setup and support will far out weigh the factor of cost in the decision of open source or commercial. fyi - I'm a big open source fan, but I have not found a PM tool that is up to par with the top commercial tools out there.

Answer 7

Sounds like you need Microsoft Project Server 2007. It's not free and it's not open source, but it meets your functionality requirements.

Answer 8

Take a look at http://www.project-open.com/

The best thing about reviewing this toolset is that that have a virtual appliance, so there is no barrier to having a running version in your organisation. (Others may also do this of course).

It is web based, open source, could probably support 100 users on that VM as it's based upon openACS.

It definitely supports leave types, but unsure about the on-call status in a useful format.

It has a whole module for configuration management

Budget planning&review, project scheduling, it does very well.

I think that covers 95% of what you want, and that's only because I'm uncertain of an on-call status. The only question is if you like it.

-Paul

Answer 9

Project management/scheduling shouldn't be comingled with change management of your IT infrastructure. For the former, check out HP PPM and for the later consider something like Remedy.