I have been searching for project/task/issue Management Tools/Platforms from last few weeks and my search is still on. You may want to read my previous post on this search here. I have stumbled across a Project Management and Business Collaboration tool Platform. This tool Platform allows you to Manage Projects, Collaborate with Teams and overall organization, Edit Documents, Chat etc. This platform is known as TeamLab.
As soon as I stopped reading TeamLab’s overview I was tempted to signup so that I can try it. To my surprise I did not find a link (common in almost all popular hosted tools/platforms) called “Plans and Pricing”. I searched the website in and out and figured out it is truly free to use. Hence I did not want to waste a second to signup. I quickly signed-up and tried TeamLab. TeamLab is quick and clean, lightweight but with loads of features. The performance is amazing if you are behind restricted corporate network you still can work at a pretty good speed.
Here is a quick look at features
- Quick signup and you can look at as corporate project portal
- Add employees and colleagues to your team
- Assign tasks to members
- Discuss on various topics.
- Create project wide milestones and schedules
- As with milestones you can Time Track
- Reporting
- Group employees via Lists and put them as department or whatever role explains them best
- With virtualized OpenOffice instance you can edit documents
- Create your private DMS
- Share/Import/Integrate documents
- Notify document changes
- Apply filters to documents
Apart from these, other features you might be interested in
- Wiki
- Forum
- News and Events
- Photos
- Bookmarking
- Contact Lists
- IM Clients
- Notifications
Features in pipeline, are CRM and Email Management. Mobile support is also on its way.
Teamlab offers business and organizations with a platform to manage and collaborate on projects. It is a platform, which is quick, effective, and easy to use, to top it up it is free.
TeamLab is very intuitive in its look and feel, its easy and very well arranged. This makes it using a wonderful experience. From individuals to professionals to enterprises, TeamLab caters to all of them with ease, its no-complexity mode makes you feel using it from day one and it hardly requires any training. With good FAQ you and your team can learn this in couple of hours and probably rollout in couple of days for your entire team (depends on size though).
Those individuals, professionals, and teams can use TeamLab , who need a tool platform to collaborate with other members and increase their productivity at the same time reduce the chaos. TeamLab IM can help you communicate with peers immediately and you can reach any available member that reduces a step of calling and mailing your peers. As I said earlier the signup is quick and it is easy to locate on the landing page itself. It takes less than 60secs to complete the signup. In minutes your portal would be up and running. You can also change the logo and name of the portal, if you wish to redirect it to a custom domain you can also do so in settings->DNS. If you have projects running in basecamp you can also import stuff from basecamp. The only thing you may want to think while doing this, is the project data will become open for all your team members. You can also create project templates if you think some projects follow common frameworks. This way you can quickly set milestones and schedules.
Couple of features that I see as drawback as of now, may be folks at TeamLab would be working on them
Content is open to all users of your portal. Even if it is read-only.TeamLab have changed this feature and added private permissions- It has backup module but does not support restore back
- Basecamp data can be imported but data becomes open to all users.
Another feature I think is missing from software development perspective is lack of Code Repository Integration. This feature is not that urgent from project management perspective. We are talking purely from project management perspective.
Implementation wise this tool platform comes in three flavors
- Amazon AMI’s – You can set it up as an Amazon Instance and use it, you pay for instances
- SaaS – Free you can setup via Signup
- OpenSource – Download and setup in your premise.
Overall TeamLab portal can be used by
- Teams who are at distant geographical locations.
- Teams who are in-premise and want to customize some of features.
- Individuals who want to efficiently manage their peers and increase their productivity with easy collaboration platform
Note
A reader asked me remove the word tool and replace it with word platform. As per him calling TeamLab just a tool would be inappropriate. I take that as a valid feedback.
What choices we have for Source Code Management + Project Management?
To keep things straight I am not going to right which one is good. This all depends on your comfort; style and what you are looking for (features). All tools give something or other, however they miss few features too in comparison.
This is post is coming from a 3 week long study which I had performed for my projects. I had to evaluate lot of things
- Repositories/Source Code Management Tools
- Server
- Client Support (Gui, Command Line or any integration)
- Project Trackers/Management Tool
- Server
- GUI
- Reports
- Extensions/Modules/Plugins
- Workflow
- Type of Implementation
- In-Premise
- Hosted
- Cloud (Self-Managed)
- Cloud (Managed)
- Appliances
Source Code Management
1. CVS
Probably, one of the oldest and simplest – source code versioning System. Low learning curve. Easy implementation, number of tools available and chances are there that your linux box already has it.
2. Subversion
Most popular code versioning system. Easy to setup, again low learning curve. Tools available and many project management system honor it and provide integrations.
3. GIT
One of quickly acceptable distributed versioning system. Popularity is growing thanks to projects like Github. Takes a wee bit more time to get handy.
4. Perforce
Good versioning system, proprietary, expensive. Popular in large enterprises.
5. VSS/TFS
Not played much and apart from MS development teams rest of the teams do not care about them. Complex implementation, takes some time to learn.
6. Mercurial
Again quite popular easy to setup inbuilt web-based management, Distributed SCM. Will take some time to get hands on. Although quite intuitive
7. Fossil
Easy to setup Distributed SCM. Although quite intuitive. Inbuilt web-based management, and issue tracking system.
8. Bazaar
Quite popular, easy to implement. Those who find SVN easy will find Bazaar quite easy. Number of tools/extensions. Several IDE integration
9. ClearCase
IBM’s expensive, rich in features SCM learning curve exists. However if you use this suite you may think 10times before switching.
10. Monotone
Those who are looking for reliability over performance may look at this tool. Not so intuitive. Will certainly need time to learn.
Project Trackers/Management Tool
[* I have included only those who support Code Repository/Integration]
1. Trac
Easy to setup provide integration SVN, Mercurial, Bazaar, Git, Monotone, Perforce. Apart from regular task tracking, Trac came has test case management system for script based testing
2. Redmine
Easy to setup, lightweight, integration with SVN, Mercurial, Bazaar, Git. Has quite a number of plugins to extend features.
3. LibreSource
LibreSource is an exhaustive project management tool with number of features. However it has minimalistic SVN support. Not so easy to setup.
4. ActiveCollab
If you can pay price then it is one of the cleanest implementation, has quite a feature set, recently they launched subversion support.
5. Jira
Good old Project Management server, exhaustive feature list. Supports many IDE’s and SCM’s through code connectors/plugins. Popular in enterprises.
If enterprises can afford, this is most exhaustive Project Management System. For development teams it gets integrated through Visual Studio Team System.(Available with 2007 and 2010 versions). However best suited for MS Based development teams other wise for just EPM it is one of the best we have.
7. Unfuddle
If you are looking for hosted solutions one of the clean implementation for GIT/SVN integrated project tracking solution quite inexpensive and have a free plan
8. Assembla
Supports GIT, Mercurial, SVN, free plans allows you to choose only one tool. Free for public projects. Clean and crisp implementation
9. Springloops
Just like unfuddle and assembla, a hosted project tracking tools with SVN and GIT. However as SpringLoops guys recommend it for web development studios.
10. Github
Most popular repository and project management hosted solution has only Git support. Do I have to say anything about them, numbers speak for them. Free for public projects.
Few project management tools I did not mention viz
Above tools can be signed up separately and can be integrated with Codesion which hosts Subversion, Git and CVS repositories. They are great tools individually but since I was looking for one platform I really did not look at them. I have used one or other through different ways in different capacity at some point in time. If you are looking for just project management you can use them. You can also look at Huddle I find it good when you do not need Source Repositories and a document repository would be just good. Huddle is quite an exhaustive platform with numerous tools/features along with On the Go/Mobile support.
One thing if you are looking for 10mins setup which includes Redmine+Mercury+Bazaar+SVN+GIT you can look at turnkey appliance for redmine. They also offer just source code management appliance. They provide cloud implementation.
If I am missing which I am certain of any tool worth looking at please drop in. I will include them in this list.
Its been a while that Google Cloud Print is available on the clouds. Now worked with it for 2 weeks I am kind of liking it. I have setup between all my windows machine, which is bad as of now, as its available only on windows. What is cloud printing you can follow this link Google Cloud Print
I am eagerly waiting for its availability on MacOS, Android and iOS. Since my remote devices are majorly these instead of windows. Since I have parallels on my MacBookPro I can turn on windows and fire a print remotely. Also, Parallels gives you ChromiumOS virtual machine which also supports Google Cloud Print. Still it would be better that we can have Google Cloud Print on Non-Windows Operating Systems.
Hey Google bring out Mac and Android version as fast as possible….are you listening me ???
