I've been following along with ActiveCollab's progress for the past year, and I've yet to take the plunge, for the lack of two major things:
1. A desktop application / interface (I'm on Mac). I can't really depend on a project management system if I can't at least access my project information in the case that my internet connection is down or when I'm traveling and not somewhere that has internet access. Sure, it's great for collaborating/discussing a project, but unless there's some way of having all the project information in an offline form, then I can't really _manage_ it all in a dependable way. Instead, I depend on another desktop application for my main management, and use Basecamp as a stop-gap solution for collaboration.
A solution to this could be in the form of an Adobe AIR application to be cross-platform, or it could be a Mac-only application. A great example is PackRat that interfaces with Backpack. Or, maybe there's an existing project management application that would somehow interface with ActiveCollab. It seems like with the API that one of these things would be possible?
2. An "approval & revision workflow" system. A big part of what I would with ActiveCollab is dealing with clients regarding design proofs. The eventual goal with each project - and the only way for it to move forward - is for them to "approve" it. I need to be able to assure that such a process is as foolproof as possible, and it seems like it would be very easy to do, and could be either very simple, or provide advanced features for marking revisions. As mentioned in a few other threads, there are some different ideas for this, from building a very basic module that is part of ActiveCollab, to some coordination with existing services such as GetSignOff or ProofHQ.
With some solutions for those two things, and I'm sold.
If you need something you can access on your deskktop - I'd recommend something like Filemaker.
We us aC for large projects that we need to collaborate with a few outside folks, but found it was too limiting for all of our inhouse project management (Too many small projects). aC is great for collaborating, but the lack of sortable lists and speed was a big part of our decision to use FIlemaker for inhouse PM.
Filemaker is great as you can create the database & set if up anyway you need. I had no Database creation experience, but after a Saturday morning of watching tutorials at Lynda.com, we created our own system that is perfect for our needs.
I'd still rather us aC, so everything is in one place, but they have a lot of testing to do before they implement features & there is no guarantee that the features we requested meet the approval of the masses enough for them to add them. With Filemaker we can create changes whenever we want.
Thanks cyandesign. I've actually explored FileMaker as well, but like you said, you still need to use something else like ActiveCollab for collaboration aspects, and I imagine that you have some redundant data entry, since there is not relationship between your Filemaker info and ActiveCollab.
Is there anything that exists that could connect them? That is, if you had a FMP database set up as a project management tool, could you in some way export a project to ActiveCollab, or pull data from Filemaker thru ActiveCollab? Some kind of "FileMaker plugin for ActiveCollab" or "ActiveCollab export module for FileMaker," etc....?
I don't know about connecting them. There is a web aspect to FM, that we have not looked into, but I suspect that is just for publishing database info, not interacting with it. That is well over my head.
The amount of crossover for us is small, as we are using Filemaker to keep track of all of the jobs (100+ a month) and then using aC to collab on the big projects 1 to 2 a month.
I suppose I"m looking for something that doesn't exist, but it seems like there would be one solution for "collaborative project management" somehow, that would work well from both aspects, without having to have several different, unrelated tools with redundant information.
I can appreciate ActiveCollab simply as a "Basecamp alternative" but it seems like it has the potential to be so much more than that by allowing integration with other products like FileMaker, or other desktop project management apps.
Ideapower, is it possible that you're looking for something similar to an implementation of GoogleGears in activecollab -- I think it might be complicated but I'm guessing that you'd be happy with a way to access the information temporarily while offline and then sync back up when you are online. I'm sure there are a lot of things that would make this difficult from multiple users, and different things but if there was a way to use something like Google Gears to pull an offline view of everything and then when you are back to an internet connection you'd be able to post/upload/etc that might be something worth considering.
Essentially a Read Only version of all content, available offline --- you could do a lot of this via RSS reader I'm guessing but not in such a great visual format as if Active Collab worked offline using something like Google Gears, with the interface you are familiar with etc.
1. A desktop application / interface (I'm on Mac). I can't really depend on a project management system if I can't at least access my project information in the case that my internet connection is down or when I'm traveling and not somewhere that has internet access. Sure, it's great for collaborating/discussing a project, but unless there's some way of having all the project information in an offline form, then I can't really _manage_ it all in a dependable way. Instead, I depend on another desktop application for my main management, and use Basecamp as a stop-gap solution for collaboration.
A solution to this could be in the form of an Adobe AIR application to be cross-platform, or it could be a Mac-only application. A great example is PackRat that interfaces with Backpack. Or, maybe there's an existing project management application that would somehow interface with ActiveCollab. It seems like with the API that one of these things would be possible?
2. An "approval & revision workflow" system. A big part of what I would with ActiveCollab is dealing with clients regarding design proofs. The eventual goal with each project - and the only way for it to move forward - is for them to "approve" it. I need to be able to assure that such a process is as foolproof as possible, and it seems like it would be very easy to do, and could be either very simple, or provide advanced features for marking revisions. As mentioned in a few other threads, there are some different ideas for this, from building a very basic module that is part of ActiveCollab, to some coordination with existing services such as GetSignOff or ProofHQ.
With some solutions for those two things, and I'm sold.