I recently discovered an open source project management tool, activeCollab, from Brian Lamb’s del.icio.us feed. As usual, when I follow a breadcrumb at Abject Learning I am not disappointed.
UMW’s Department of Information technology has been using Basecamp sporadically for a little while now, and DTLT has been using it lately to manage the Student Academy of Information Technologies (there are some really exciting presentations this year so there will be more to blog on this shortly). I think we all agree that this is a very useful tool for more involved projects with various players. So, when I saw activeCollab I was intrigued, when I downloaded and installed it I was quite impressed. This open source, web-based application makes no qualms about presenting itself as a no-frills Basecamp knock-off. There are no wiki-inspired Writeboards and the slick javascript is kept to a minimum, but it does just about everything Basecamp does without the monthly costs. It allows for unlimited projects, unlimited users, multiple admins, etc. So how about that- the nuts and bolts of the best of web-based project management applications for the price of a LAMP environment you are probably already paying for! Moreover, it was a cinch to set up -just keep in mind you need Apache 2.0, PHP 5.1+ and MySQL 4.1+.
I installed that on Friday (another step in my ongoing motivation-lacking activities). Very cool stuff, that. I’d been using another Rails app for to-do list management, but will switch over to this exclusively. projects.darcynorman.net
free rocks.
Free does, indeed, rock. As does your Drupal youtube site! I was impressed with how quick and easy activeCollab is to setup, not to mention that they just lifted the look and feel of Basecamp so directly. I’m certainly not complaining -but I wonder if the folks at 39 signals are miffed.
miffed schmiffed. it’s also a one-click install with Dreamhost.. doesn’t get easier than that…
Thanks for the tip. We use base camp at work, but I’ve been looking for something for me to use for my school-related work and this may be a good answer to my quest. I’ll check it out.