Move Over Basecamp - Make Room for activeCollab
Who likes free productivity software? We do!
Update #2: ActiveCollab is no longer being developed as free software. For a free branch of activeCollab that is a great community driven effort, check out ProjectPier.
Update #1: Read this interview with the developer of activeCollab to find out why he changed from free to paid software.
You have a choice
I'm sure many readers already know what Basecamp is, but for those who don't, please don't click this link, (unless you don't like free)...
Rather, click this one...
ActiveCollab has taken the best parts of Basecamp and other project management and document sharing software suites, and incorporated these into a powerful server based program that is free. That's right you read it correctly, free. Read more after the jump...
Today the developer has made the Release Candidate for version 0.7 public, meaning that its so close to being ready, that he's willing to let the world try it out, and any upgrade to the final 0.7 release will be relatively straight forward.
Its been two and a half months since activeCollab 0.6 was released. Its been a successful release because it solved some pretty nasty problems that activeCollab alpha had and provided pretty much stable platform for whole two months. Now is time to move on and introduce activeCollab 0.7. For start it's a release candidate, but it will be replaced with full 0.7 during next week if everything goes as planned (nothing major should change in the meantime so simple file rewrite will be enough to upgrade).
Source: activeCollab website - activeBlog
What is activeCollab?
So what do you do with this software? From the website:
activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free!
There are no limitations as to the number of projects, users, files or documents that you use, aside from the data limit on your server storage, consider the following table, (links to Basecamp), showing that many of the business type plans start at $24 dollars a month, up to $149 a month. Now that may not be a lot of money for a large, established business, but consider that even the cheapest of the "business" plans still means 100 less coffees! Now I'm not intending to criticize Basecamp, but for a similar software, (not quite as polished, but stable, easy and intuitive to use), to offer their product for free it makes me wonder why companies are spending money on Basecamp? 37 Signals is nothing like Microsoft, but the analogy remains true for the comparison between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.
I've downloaded the RC0.7 release of activeCollab, and will be installing it over the weekend. For a full list of the features see "What's New"
You can check out a basic activeCollab screencast of the features to show you how to use the software in your workflow and project management.
As of version 1.0, activeCollab is no longer free - check out ProjectPier for a free, open source alternative that has branched from the activeCollab 0.7.1 version.
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Last night I posted an article at Urbanworkbench - Sustainable Engineering Designs on a recent update to the server side project management and collaboration software - ActiveCollab. I'm really excited about this product and my post has been pic
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Apologies for the lack of images, (at time of posting), I'm having some ftp issues, these should be resolved soon!
Update1: I persisted in trying Windows Live Writer, and think I've found a bug in how it uses the ftp to upload images, not sure what the bug is, but until I moved the screenshots and repathed the links, there was nothing there. Thanks for your patience.
Update2: From my end there still seems to be problems with the three images in this document not being displayed, any problems with your viewing?
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Submitted by Mike on Fri, 29/09/2006 - 04:05.Hey Mike,
This software looks great, what do I need to get it running? Can I run it on my home PC?
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Submitted by JSOwen (not verified) on Sat, 30/09/2006 - 00:27.Any computer can act as a web server. If you set up PHP and MySQL on your local machine you can use activeCollab without any problems.
Here are the instructions how to get everything up and running.
Thanks for this entry :)
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Submitted by Ilija Studen (not verified) on Sat, 30/09/2006 - 04:40.@Ilija - I'm glad I could get some renewed interest in your software. It's great! My use of it is quite limited at the moment, but I'm enjoying the interface.
Any chance for a reorder tasks AJAX script in the next release. This would help with workflow management and would be more useful than a p"priority numbering system.
Thanks for your post on how to set it up locally too. I'm not so sure why you'd want to though, aside from testing it out or tweaking it.
@JSOwen - Hope Ilija has answered your questions in the post he linked to.
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Submitted by Mike on Sat, 30/09/2006 - 05:42.My guess is that people would like to use activeCollab as personal organization tool. Simple projects, to-do lists, messages, they can attach files... Simple tools that are easy to use and everything is packed together.
Making an extranet for collaboration with clients or small space for team collaboration was the main goal, but activeCollab can be use for other stuff too.
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Submitted by Ilija Studen (not verified) on Sun, 01/10/2006 - 09:40.Post new comment