I started looking at online project management software yesterday – nothing fancy, but I was comparing the stuff from 37signals (Basecamp, Backpack, etc) to GoPlan.org.  I ended up signing up for a free account with both and was a little frustrated knowing the restrictions on usage because I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for the service.  I was spending too much time trying to anticipate which projects were most important to me to manage and not enough time managing products.

So yesterday afternoon I started looking through open source alternatives. There used to be something called ActiveCollab that was free/open source, but they switched to a pay model recently and there’s no free version. Definitely not going that direction, so I started looking for a fork. Sure enough, there’s something out there called ProjectPier at ProjectPier.org that’s a split of ActiveCollab that has committed to staying open source.

I downloaded ProjectPier and installed it on my server – and I love it. Has the features I need (task management, note collaboration, milestones, etc) and will help me infinitely in managing not only my personal projects (BravesBlast, Project Mayhem, a few other ideas I’m popping around), but my school projects as well – any large group project is going to get a project so we can exchange files, thoughts, and tasks.

Check it out if you have a server and are looking for some project management software.  I think it’s some good stuff.

Take care,

Colin