Project management: SharePoint vs activeCollab

Question

I'm trying to choose a project management and collaboration software for our next project and would like to know your opinion on "enterprisey" SharePoint vs. "lightweight" alternatives like BaseCamp or activeCollab (from the two, I would prefer the latter).

Features that are important to us:

• document sharing (specifications, manuals etc.)
• discussion forums (I hate when important information is lost in the inbox)
• issue tracking
• Subversion integration would be nice to have but probably neither SharePoint, nor activeCollab currently support it, do they?

Other things like time tracking are less important to us (although nice to have).

When I compare the two solutions, I see these strong points and drawbacks:

• Killer feature of SharePoint is Office integration. For instance, specification is much better authored in MS Word with styles, image drag&drop etc. compared to a plain HTML textarea and some plain text format. We also use Outlook quite extensively so it would be good if we could leverage this tool.
• activeCollab is web based and has a slick user interface which is important for adoption in our company (if our devs don't find the solution easy to work with, they will not use it). My boss also kind of likes easy solutions and activeCollab wins easily in this area.

Regarding price, activeCollab is something like few hundreds dollars (reasonable one time cost) but I'm not too sure about SharePoint. If I'm right, the basic "SharePoint Services" version would be enough for us (I don't think we need the full MS Office SharePoint Server) and in that case, we need only Windows Server licence (which we already) and a SQL Server licence (would SQL Server Express work? or do we need at least workgroup edition?). This means that even SharePoint doesn't need to be too expensive if we go for the lowest edition.

Is there anyone who did the same comparison and could possibly provide more insight?

Answer 1

SharePoint services can be used with SQL Express. For full text search support, do not forget to download SP2 with advanced features : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/ . So If you have a 2003 server licence, you're all set.

Currently, we manage a few projects using WSS V3. It's going quite well, we've implemented issue tracking with a custom list, and document sharing is very efficient (it's the base of WSS).

Answer 2

If you went with SharePoint, you would only need the base, Windows SharePoint Services, not Microsoft Office SharePoint Services. Between that, plus the fact that Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is now free, you should do fine.

You will need to add an issue tracking system, though you could start with the built-in issue tracking list, and then customize it. In particular, it's fairly simple to add workflow to any list, and SharePoint workflows are based on Windows Workflow Foundation, meaning that you should be able to integrate with anything. You might do the same for your subversion integration.

Answer 3

Opengoo has all of the features you mention -except subverion integration, but including time tracking.

I see it as something in between basecamp and sharepoint. The only thing for which may be weaker is in office integration, thou I think fengoffice offers an office plugin.

Someone did a comparison of opengoo vs activecollab. I'll post it here when I find it.

edit: Here is the link: http://forums.opengoo.org/index.php?topic=617.0

Answer 4

Is Sharepoint Services available from internet or only from intranet ? THANK YOU

Answer 5

ActiveCollab now has Subversion integration

Answer 6

i know this post is old, but i currently use both basecamp and activecollab. i handled the install of AC as well and it was about as painless as it gets.

managing it has been a breeze, and yes there is subversion integration.

as a temporary measure, i put fedora on n intel-based mac mini, and installed activeCollab and it runs great (yes, i do offsite database and file backups).