Update: it’s no secret that I am using Basecamp for project management these days.
The Linux desktop may not be ready for Joe User and his grandmother, but is it ready for the knowledge worker? This is a question I’ve somewhat accidentally been endeavoring to answer since the semester started. A lot of people go looking to prove Linux out when it comes to the desktop in a sort of anti-Microsoft methodology. My latest experimentation, though, wasn’t born out of a desire to prove Linux right or Microsoft wrong—it came out of an immediate need for tools to get my job done as project manager at school. While NJIT provides a lot of these programs for download through Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program, I wasn’t able to get a hold of them easily (the intranet site required that I authenticate three separate times, and still wouldn’t let me do it!). Read on to see just how Linux is performing in these areas.
Email Client
I had previously written about how I was in dire want of the killer email application for Windows, a task that I didn’t think would be quite so hard. I mean, email has been around for at least 25 years or so—you figure that somebody would have gotten it right by now. Much to my frustration, though, no one could suggest a viable alternative to my buggy Microsoft Outlook or the MSN-happy Outlook Express. I had, for a time, gone back to Outlook Express, but the idea of using Ximian Evolution got a hold of me and wouldn’t let go. However, this wasn’t the main reason that I started booting to Linux for personal use. Update: I just totally realized that Evolution will read XML news bites from the web! What does that mean? Well, in Geek it means that I can add a news source to my Summary page by simply typing in the address for the RDF file, such as ours, here. Woah.
Diagramming
Though I didn’t write about this, Darin and I had engaged in the search for an alternative to Microsoft’s Visio some months back because we were both so psyched about the Redhat 8.0 release. Darin really wanted to find a tool that would be able to create some of the diagrams that he worked with on a regular basis at work. In the process of looking for that tool, I found Dia. Dia is an open-source diagramming solution for Linux, which has been ported to Windows. While it can’t import Microsoft’s proprietary (read: market-preserving) file formats for Visio, the tool serves quite nicely on its own to let you create network diagrams, flowcharts, and entity-relationship diagrams. It will also export to a number of formats, including .jpg and scalable vector graphics.
Project Management
One of my requirements for this project is to provide the team and my professor with task lists and Gantt charts to show the team productivity. Microsoft Project is the standard for such project management, but as I searched the web for alternative methods (stumbling across cheesy web-based JavaScript Gantt generators along the way), I discovered MrProject. MrProject is essentially a GNOME-based Gantt generator—no frills, no huge featureset: just Gantt charts and some basic project information. But, man does it do a good job at it. Though still a somewhat buggy release at v0.9 (updated Feb 17th!), MrProject is able to deliver functionality in letting me record my project data and then output it all to a PDF (buggy) or PostScript file. This is actually the program that tipped me into booting to Linux: there is no Windows port available.
Web Browser
Of course, my favorite web browser is available in Linux as well as Windows, so there was no problem here. 
I had spent some time about two months ago getting antialiased fonts to work with it as well, and copied the Windows fonts into Linux to make for a very sweet browsing experience.
Productivity
No project manager can be without his productivity applications for documentation and spreadsheets. Thankfully, OpenOffice 1.0 is free for the taking and compatible with the Microsoft Word and Excel proprietary (read: market-rigging) file formats. So, as long as no one tries to go nuts with creating OLE-embedded movies in our specification documents (does anyone really do that?!), I should be compatible with the rest of the team’s productivity apps.
Is it possible that I will be able to successfully manage this project after having spent $0 on software? About 12 more weeks will tell the story.
As I have recently become a member of the RIFed IT masses I am using the time to update my technical skills. Linux seems to be a viable alternative to the M$ platform.
I am wondering how well Mr. Project is meeting your needs. It appears to have the feature set I have most often observed in use by Project Managers.
Any feedback on challenges would be appreciated.
Thanks, Bill
It is for me … I actually would love an XSLT method of tranforming a *.mrproject file (which is just XML) into a set of web pages (Gannt, Resource List, Tasks …) so a project could be “Webified” for viewing now and then. This also might help to spec out some missing features (like the ability to associate arbitrary files, links, and e-mail messages with tasks and thus points on a Gannt).
If MrProject could be associated with an mbox formatted mail folder that gets formatted for the webifed version using MHonArch or a similar external tool that would be cool. Then mail could be received for the project via SMTP and sorted to a mailbox (with attachments etc.) A piece of mail could be viewed from mrproject since the app would just launch the users mail client when the attached document (in this case e-mail) link is clicked on inside MrProject. You’d a get a web archive and custom project management view of the project and related mail.
Note: this is all very doable with not too much extra work. If MrProject can use DBus or CORBA/Orbit to laucn e-mail clients and a browser …. we’re there. The export to “webified” project directory might be tricky but …
Hi Bill. Thanks for your comments and sorry to hear about the layoff. I hope the time off has been productive for you and helped you to refocus on what’s important. I also hope that you’re chasing some good leads for new employment!
Mr. Project, while a decent piece of software with a good user interface, still has a number of issues outstanding that surface when using the product. Some of these are as niggling as no keyboard shortcuts (which become not-so-niggling when you try to enter large quantities of data). One of the bigger issues is that I couldn’t use the PDF export feature to export my Gantt charts for printout. This was a big deal—especially when I was required to do so for a presentation. The PDF format is buggy and will crash Adobe Acrobat.
Mr. Anonymous makes a great point that the open file format makes this less of an issue: I could have simply applied XSLT to the XML format that Mr. Project uses, but XSLT is a bit unweildly. I still have to take a breath when I delve into my site CSS, let alone dynamically formatting data with XSLT.
I finally decided that the biggest problem with Mr. Project was the same as any open source software: I just spent too much time trying to make it work and not enough time getting work done. I explored this productivity problem in an entry at our team project website:
http://www.kennsarah.net/project/archives/000162.shtml
Hope that helps.
List of open source project management tools.
http://proj.chbs.dk/
Found while searching for a collaboration tool to be used in the rebuild of my church website (still searching for the best tool).
The reduction of project management to drawing Gantt chars seems to be misleading. Most of the systems at proj.chbs.dk http://proj.chbs.dk/ have a wider scope and also address project collaboration and the setup, controlling and finishing phases of projects. Checkout the M-Modell, for example at http://www.pm-studie.de/ .
Bests,
Frank
Frank–good insight. As it turns out, Gantt diagrams tended to be my least favorite activity for my Senior Project class because they took me away from doing “real work”–sending emails, making phone calls, writing documentation, and so on. Also, since I had been reading up on other management techniques (like XP), I thought of my project in more agile, unstructured terms. Gantt charts work with the assumption that tasks can be completely known ahead of time, which Agile methodology points out is simply not true.
In practice, I used Mantis BT http://mantisbt.sourceforge.net to act as a “backlog” of tasks that needed getting done for our project. That way, I could simply assign high-priority tasks to the responsible parties. It also meant a lot of “bug triage” in order to determine what was high priority and what wasn’t, but that work seemed more useful to me than trying to draw fancy Gantt charts that no one was looking at other than our professor (“management”).
In passing, I noticed dotProject http://dotproject.net/ (listed on proj.chbs.dk) seems to be a very usable and interesting system for web-based project management. Thanks for the links!