Hi,

Every of the listed features have a lot of similarities, but also there is always something specific about them that makes them more suitable for some tasks than for other.

Pages are for collaborative writing. What is unique about them is their support for versioning and organization in tree like structure (you can have chapters, sub-chapters etc without limit in number of levels). Here at A51 we use them for all sort of writing - blog posts, articles etc.

Discussions section is a little forum inside of every project.

Tickets are bigger tasks. They support history and time tracking, subtasking, attachments etc. They are so feature rich that some people use them as subprojects.

Milestones are used to mark inportant project stages. For instance, if you work on software project you may have milestones like this:

Product v1.0 Beta
Product v1.0 RC1
Product v1.0 RC2
Product v1.0 Final
Product v1.1 Beta
...

Tickets, pages, discussions etc can be (optionally) associated with a milestone so you know witch stage of project development they belong to.

Concepts are pretty basic and things fall in place easily when you get a bit more familiar with activeCollab. You just need to use it on a real project to see how all things fit together.

While I understand the page/discussion distinction, there are times when I wonder if it is entirely ... functional in many actual use cases.

Consider: generally we wish to post a site/project plan, and then have a discussion about it, with the project lead modifying the document as they go on.

Currently, this means the origin of the discussion must be posted as a page, with a follow-up discussion about that page referencing the page. It would be more convenient and logical to have the live document we're discussing embedded at the top of the discussion.

That could, of course, be accomplished by making the original post in a discussion revisable, or by allowing objects to be embedded in other pages...

You tell that to some of my clients who have MBAs ;)

Key similarity between checklists and tickets is that both can have subtasks. On top of that tickets can have comments, attachments and can be sorted in categories. Checklists does not support that and are more like simple lists of tasks. Tickets are like bigger tasks that involve discussion and can evolve through time.

Tasks, tickets and milestones can any number of assignees but only one of them is responsible. That is the person in front of a group who is responsible for task to be completed.

It is possible to see other people tasks, but only in v1.1 (currently in beta).