Open Project & Microsoft Project

Project Management[edit]

Top-down/Bottom-up project planning: Projects can consist of an arbitrary number of sub-projects and tasks. Using a top-down approach, a projects' total budget is split over a number of subprojects. In terms of financial estimations, the system indicates if the sum of planned units for each task in a subproject is beyond its estimated budget. Using a bottom-up approach, a group of tasks can be aggregated to a sub-project, and multiple subprojects can form a main project. The budget of the main project is calculated based on the estimations made on a task level.

Resource Management: Based on resource assignments defined on a project level, a resource report indicates availability, or oversubscription, of resources across all open projects.

Project completion tracking: Each task owner reports task completeness. A weighted total completeness is calculated by the system.

Export to/import from OpenProj, GanttProject and Microsoft Project: Projects can be exported and further edited using either of the three desktop applications. The results than can be re-imported.

Project templates: New projects can be created based on existing projects marked as templates.

IT Service Management[edit]

IT Helpdesk: The IT Helpdesk manages the lifecycle of tickets. For each ticket type, a workflow is defined allowing configurable routing of incidents through the organization. This way the module allows the management of Incidents, Request for Change, Feature Requests, Software Bugs and other events that require life-cycle management. Collected data provides results for Key Performance Indicators and Business Intelligent Reporting, supporting management decisions.

Configuration Database: Configuration Management is supported by an integrated CMDB that ensures transparency of changes performed and provides real-time information of Configuration Items managed.

Nagios Integration: Result of Nagios scans and notifications feed the IT Helpdesk and CMDB.

Timesheet Management[edit]

Timesheet Management allows tracking of time on project tasks and tickets. Several reports are available to extract time-sheet data and make it available to supervisors or HR staff based on the integrated permission system. A pre-configured workflow allows supervisors to confirm time sheet data entered by subordinates.

Financial Management[edit]

Internal/external costs: Besides time-sheet costs, the system also allows tracking other project expenses, such as costs for travel, accommodation, etc. A pre-configured workflow allows the creation of "expense bundles" that would need to be confirmed before these costs are considered in the projects profit and loss calculation.

Invoices: Invoices can be created based on various criteria (planned/billable/logged units). This process is supported by a wizard. Also other financial documents, such as Provider Bills and Quotes are created semi-automatically, based on data about customers and projects managed by the system.

Cost Centers: The cost-center module allows assignments of costs to cost centers across projects.

Financial Reporting: Several financial reporting are available to determine profit and loss, cash flow, and cost-effectiveness of operations. Data cubes provide data-warehouse-like reporting, giving the user the option to select dimensions.

Knowledge management and collaboration[edit]

File Manager: File Managers are used to connect arbitrary files to principal business objects such as customers, clients, users and projects. Permissions can be set on a folder level.

Wiki: A wiki with Media wiki syntax allows to associate wiki pages with projects, customer or users.

Forum: Forum supports project collaboration. Several thread types are available. For each contribution permissions can be set. Some types provide basic workflow support.

Full text search engine: A user can search across all data stored in the system. Results depend on access permissions of items found.

Human resources[edit]

Absence Management: Users can enter their absences. A pre-configured workflow is available routing the inquiry to the users supervisor.

Unified employee record: Employee data that can be managed is available to HR managers.

Skill Management: This module allows the management of user skills. Categories and attributes therein are configurable. Users can manage their skills themselves if permission is given. Supervisors can confirm or deny skills set by a user.

Customer relationship management[edit]

Unified customer record: A unified customer record contains relevant information about customers, such as contact information, financial data, past projects, etc.

Email campaigns: Email campaigns can be performed.

Email integration: Emails can be imported from a mail server and will be auto-assigned to users and projects.

Pre-sales Support: Forum and additional dynamic fields helps managing the pre-sales phase of a project.

History[edit]

Project-Open has been built based on the work of Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita. Frank Bergmann took this system and added extensions for the management of translation companies in 2003. In 2003 the project was published on Sourceforge,^[2] and Klaus Hofeditz joined the team. In 2009 the application had been extended by an ITSM Service Desk, Configuration Management Databaseand a Nagios integration to support IT Management processes.

History[edit]

Microsoft Project 2000

Microsoft Project was initially proposed by Microsoft's Manager of Product Development, Alan M. Boyd, as an internal tool to help manage the huge number of software projects that were in development at any time inside the company. Boyd wrote the specification and engaged a local Seattle company to develop the prototype.

The first commercial version of Project was released for DOS in 1984. Microsoft bought all rights to the software in 1985 and released version 2. Version 3 for DOS was released in 1986. Version 4 for DOS was the final DOS version, released in 1986. The first Windowsversion was released in 1990, and was labelled version 1 for Windows.

In 1991 a Macintosh version was released. Development continued until Microsoft Project 4.0 for Mac in 1993. In 1994, Microsoft stopped development of most of its Mac applications and did not offer a new version of Office until 1998, after the creation of the new Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit the year prior. The Mac Business Unit never released an updated version of Project, and the last version does not run natively on Mac OS X.

Microsoft Project 95 was the first to use common Office menus.

Microsoft Project 98 was the first to use Tahoma font in the menu bars and to contain Office Assistant, like all Office 97 applications. Project 98 SR-1 was a major service release addressing several issues in Project 98. ^[3]

Versions were released in 1992 (v3.0), 1993 (v4.0), 1995 (v4.1a), 1998 (v9.0), 2000 (v10.0), 2003 (v11.0), 2007 (v12.0), 2010 (v14.0) and 2013 (v15.0).^[4] There was no Version 2 on the Windows platform; the original design spec was augmented with the addition of macro capabilities and the extra work required to support a macro language pushed the development schedule out to early 1992 (Version 3).

Features[edit]

Microsoft Project 2007 showing a simpleGantt chart

Project creates budgets based on assignment work and resource rates. As resources are assigned to tasks and assignment work estimated, the program calculates the cost, equal to the work times the rate, which rolls up to the task level and then to any summary tasks and finally to the project level. Resource definitions (people, equipment and materials) can be shared between projects using a shared resource pool. Each resource can have its own calendar, which defines what days and shifts a resource is available. Resource rates are used to calculate resource assignment costs which are rolled up and summarized at the resource level. Each resource can be assigned to multiple tasks in multiple plans and each task can be assigned multiple resources, and the application schedules task work based on the resource availability as defined in the resource calendars. All resources can be defined in label without limit. Therefore it cannot determine how many finished products can be produced with a given amount of raw materials. This makes Microsoft Project unsuitable for solving problems of available materials constrained production. Additional software is necessary to manage a complex facility that produces physical goods.

The application creates critical path schedules, and critical chain and event chain methodology third-party add-ons also are available. Schedules can be resource leveled, and chains are visualized in a Gantt chart. Additionally, Microsoft Project can recognize different classes of users. These different classes of users can have differing access levels to projects, views, and other data. Custom objects such as calendars, views, tables, filters, and fields are stored in an enterprise global which is shared by all users.