Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

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volomike
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Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by volomike »

Guys, for those of you in the PHP business, what do you use to manage a workspace between you and your clients? I need something like shared calendars, tasks, bug/problems, docs -- things of that nature.

Freshmeat has a list:

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=project+ ... x=0&Go.y=0

However, I am wanting to stay fairly mainstream and see what you guys are using.

I see a lot of guys are using BasecampHQ.com, but they've got problems here or there I hear. Also, I need unlimited projects with a couple clients, and that's $149/mo -- something I don't have. So I was thinking of hosting my own and go the F/OSS route.
lornajane
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by lornajane »

It sounds like a couple of simple open source apps would see you straight, my recommendations would be for eventum (bug tracker, could also be used as a todo list) and dokuwiki for the docs/knowledge.
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onion2k
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by onion2k »

volomike wrote:Also, I need unlimited projects with a couple clients, and that's $149/mo -- something I don't have.
You need to track more than 35 active projects but you're not making enough to pay $149/mo? You must be spending an awful amount of time managing things at the moment... surely the time you save using a good service is going to pay that money (and more) isn't it? You have to consider the opportunity cost ... what are you going to lose by not paying? Coding time I imagine... and that's what you get paid for.
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volomike
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by volomike »

onion2k wrote:
volomike wrote:Also, I need unlimited projects with a couple clients, and that's $149/mo -- something I don't have.
You need to track more than 35 active projects but you're not making enough to pay $149/mo? You must be spending an awful amount of time managing things at the moment... surely the time you save using a good service is going to pay that money (and more) isn't it? You have to consider the opportunity cost ... what are you going to lose by not paying? Coding time I imagine... and that's what you get paid for.
Hmm. Good point. I'll think on that.
LSJason
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by LSJason »

Have you checked out Assembla? http://www.assembla.com/
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volomike
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by volomike »

I've decided two things:

- I want to keep this thing very simple and easy to use, breaking it down to its smallest components but yet be a couple steps above a general todo list.
- This will give me an excuse to make my own jQuery/AJAX grid control in a manner that I prefer.

So I've started a project called TabTool that is really simple. One logs in, chooses a project that they've been allotted, and see a series of tabs on the top and categories on the left. The tabs and categories are created by the admin of the project only (which is me). Project members then put "items" (for lack of a better word) into a category that goes into a tab. (This fills up items in a grid control.) An item can have a title, notes, a due date, priority, %completed, file attachments, and a state property to set it either to open, closed/completed, or archived.
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Kieran Huggins
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by Kieran Huggins »

Google Apps is a partial solution... I use Lighthouse for bug tracking.
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volomike
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by volomike »

I saw something in this topic called Tasks, Jr. tonight where the guy is just giving away the software for free.

http://crowdfavorite.com/tasks-jr/

Might be useful to you guys for a project workspace. It lacks some features, but you might be able to add them easily, as well as retheme the thing into something more modern and Web 2.0.
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Weirdan
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by Weirdan »

LSJason wrote:Have you checked out Assembla? http://www.assembla.com/
+1 from me. I don't know how assembla performs from a client (or manager) point of view, but for a developer like me it's very good.
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volomike
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by volomike »

Weirdan wrote:don't know how assembla performs from a client (or manager) point of view, but for a developer like me it's very good.
My response time from Assembla was flaky. Sometimes a click would go through. Other times it would delay for about 30-45 seconds. Makes me nervous.
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Weirdan
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by Weirdan »

volomike wrote:My response time from Assembla was flaky. Sometimes a click would go through. Other times it would delay for about 30-45 seconds. Makes me nervous.
They seem to have technical issues lately. Today I've been getting 503 service unavailable messages. They are up at the moment, but trac seems to be down still. This was not the case when I started using them about a month ago.

Oh, and 30-40 seconds is not an issue for someone, who used to use dial up :)
supermike
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Re: Managing Clients -- Project Workspace

Post by supermike »

My partner and I reviewed various shared workspace products. We looked at everything under the sun from various forum articles on the web like this, to social bookmarked recommendations, to queries on Google and blogs. In the end we settled on ActiveCollab, and I'm so glad we did. This thing is worth its weight in gold. What a beautifully designed piece of software!

Of course, if you want to go the free route, you can take everything in ActiveCollab and find a series of F/OSS projects on the web that you can install. Then, link it all with a central home page. The only problem will be the lack of integration between the various F/OSS projects.

The features we seem to be using most are:

* Calendar -- for target dates
* Discussions
* Files

But in the future we look forward to having exposed areas where individual clients can only see certain projects, and interact with us only in the areas we open up for them. For instance, clients could interact in our shared file space, cut bug report tickets, and show status updates.
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