SaaS / OnDemand Project Management Tools and . . . Amazon?
by naisan on Sep.18, 2007, under enterprise software, Mariner, project management, SaaS, Serena
Two big players emerge when you’re looking for an online project management tool:
- Basecamp (37Signals)
- Goplan.org (weBreakStuff)
I needed a tool that was simple to use, allowed me to show my management what the team was up to, and also to help the team collaborate around tasks and ensure day-to-day accountability.
I started with GoPlan, which was simple to use, easy to add nested tasks and assign them, emailed folks with their task assignments, tracked them etc. . .
But GoPlan could not give me a high-level project plan (for instance laid out in a Gantt chart) that a Sr. Exec. could collapse and expand as they wanted to vet a project plan. Since the wiki states that this is planned for a future release, I deduce that it’s not there today. To me this is vital: I say to Bob, my COO, that my plan is online here, and Bob will go to the URL, and see that we are planning to have a web-based 0-touch partner program up and running in a month. Now he wants to see the next level down, clicks into it, sees that, and gets satisfied that we’re on the right path. Two weeks in, he can go to the same page, see how we’re tracking, again drill down and see with color coding where we are in the project. Simple.
I would even want to use this for project reviews with the team, and with execs, and to ask for budget, etc. . .
I also discovered that behind Basecamp is Amazon’s web services platform: S3.
In the middle of all of this, I joined Serena, where I find out that we are actually taking our project management tool, Mariner, onto the web! Funnily enough, Mariner addresses all of my concerns, so hope abounds 
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September 19th, 2007 on 00:15
If you’re talking about big players why don’t you take Wrike? http://www.wrike.com/It looks pretty big; they say they’ve got thousands of users all over the world. Anyway, if you haven’t heard of it, you should definitely check it out. It’s more a project management tool than Basecamp. It’s not just my opinion. You could read this article at PCworld.com to make sure: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134816-c,webservices/article.html