With all of the activities I’m trying to get through around my SOHO systems infrastructure, I’ve decided to use as much project management practice as possible to improve my control of the tasks. However, I remain commited to weaning myself from the Microsoft teat, even on the PM front. As part of this, I’ve been reviewing some of the open-source/free project management alternative available, with a view to migrating my existing MS projects and templates to a cross-platform, open solution. Any new project efforts would be done in this software as well. So, what do I need for my PM software:

  1. It needs to support import/export from MS-project. I need this, simply because the rest of the world uses it, and I almost certainly will need to exchange project information with others.
  2. I need this solution to offer automatic resource leveling; manual is just too much work.
  3. Multi-chart capability (Gantt, network, etc.).
  4. Some sort of calendar export or integration would be great, just to help keep to milestones and deliverable schedules.
  5. Cut & paste or text-based import/export.

So far, I’ve checked out some fairly interesting ones, not all of which meet my wish-list:

All of the above have some intriguing features, but I am still going through the list. There’s others I’m looking into as well. For the moment, I’ve done up my projects and tasks in Google spreadsheets, since that allows me to quickly load them into almost any PM tool I choose (either import or cut & paste). Hopefully I’ll be able to decide quickly, since I need this sorted out to manage all the other activities going on!

Cheers,
Duane