Project Pier Evaluation

Project Pier was originally forked from ActiveCollab. They have diverged quite a bit since then. Mostly because ActiveCollab has been adding features, but the design is different too.

I’d say that Project Pier has a cleaner design and better semantics, but I miss some of the features of ActiveCollab: rich text edit, pages, calendar, iCalendar integration, tickets, and time tracking to list the most prominent. They are significantly different enough to warrant individual comparison. In fact, I’d say GoPlan and Basecamp are more similar than ProjectPier and ActiveCollab.

Project Pier adminstration is broken into:

1. Company information
2. Team Members
3. Clients
4. Add or Delete Projects
5. Configuration — general & mail setup
6. Tools – consists of email test and bulk email.
7. Upgrade -an automatic update option

A project contains the following elements:

1. Overview
2. Messages
3. Tasks
4. Milestones
5. Files
6. Tags
7. Forms
8. People

I think this is a pretty good division.

The Overview is similar to all the other tools in this category, prominently featuring a list of “Recent Activities” — Tasks, Task Lists, Comments, Messages, Files, Milestones, etc. and milestones due.

It has breadcrumbs navigation and search at the top of the page, and on the right side, links to forms, project status, involved companies, and a link to the Recent Activities RSS feed.

Links to add the four main elements are included:

Messages
Task Lists
Milestones
Files

These all have basic name and description, boolean options (such as private), notification flag, and tags. I like tags, only apparently one message/tasklist/milestone/file can only have one tag. This does allow multiple-word tags.

A message also has importance, and the ability to attach files. Comments can be enabled or disabled.
The number of options makes it slightly painful to scroll down to submit.

Messages are in plain text only. — Actually it looks like wiki text is supported, just not mentioned.

Task lists can be associated to a milestone (but need not be — I like that for when I’m still planning.)
Several () tasks entry fields are included at the bottom, for quick entry. Nice, but I’d like to see more. Maybe you don’t need so many rows per task for entry, especially when they’re displayed on single rows.

A milestone also has a due date and assignee.

Messages and task lists can be assigned to a milestone, but they don’t have to be. That’s nice!

Files can be put in folders, but folders can’t be nested. That might be a good enforcement.

Attachments to messages are listed in all files, and can be sorted into folders (and tagged.) Nice!
But I did see one glitch where the attachment to a message seemed orphaned.
Files can be moved to different folders.
There are default folders that can be modified in the administration. I like that.
File revisions can be tracked, but there appears to be no diffing ability. That’s always been a problem for binary files such as DOC, PDF, image, or spreadsheets, though — the most likely files to be uploaded. I miss Trac’s feature though for text or code.

As mentioned, it appears one item can only have one tag, which is unfortunate. Still, tags offer a nice sorting method, but not too different than folders (except messages, tasks, and milestones don’t go in folders.)

People from the company and client can be added to one project and permissions are adequate and not too complex.

All in all, I’d say ProjectPier edges out both GoPlan and Basecamp — taking the best features of both, being semantically clear, intuitive, and well documented. And most of all — FREE.

It’s an open source (LAMP) application that you download and install on your own servers, which is actually a plus, most of the time.

I miss the wiki capabilities of linking between pages and a calendar. A work break down can be a spreadsheet, but that gives a disconnect with tasks.

Tests, Requirements, and Tasks need more semantic information. And a defect tracking program is needed, but the simple issue trackers included in other apps aren’t really adequate.

— it looks like WordPress ate another post.  A draft of this was saved (what you see above.)