5 Free Apps That Make Project Management Easier
Putting together a project plan can sometimes seem more daunting than completing the project itself. When you need to track each step of a project, along with your costs, staff, and other factors, you probably need a project management application.
Gantter.com doesn't have nearly as many features as for-pay applications such as Microsoft Office Project, which includes collaboration, synchronizing with different calendars across several resources, networking and additional enterprise-worthy features. In fact, it pretty much operates at a beginner's level of charting; it focuses simply on planning, and time and budget estimation of your project via Gantt charting in the most elementary, quickest and simplest manner possible. With this in mind, a standout feature of Gantter.com is that you can easily create custom calendar templates, in which you can, for example, mark any day (other than the traditional weekend) as a non-working day.
Microsoft Office Project files can only be imported into Gantter.com if they are first exported to XML. Gantter.com cannot directly read the proprietary Office Project file format. So information and formatting may be lost exporting to XML and then loading the file into Gantter.com. Not surprisingly, Gantter.com cannot save your plan to the Office Project file format.
Another drawback: You cannot print your plan from within Gantter.com. Its developer, Volodymyr Mazepa, says he plans to add print functionality in the future. But for now it's best to use this project management app to create XML-based project plans from scratch.
I really like the tutorial that the site provides. Don't know what Gantt charts are, what a "resource" is, what a "task bar" represents, or how these elements are compiled and brought together when formulating your project plan? Check out gantter.com and follow the tutorial. You'll learn the basics in less than an hour, if even that. And the general rundown also works as a good primer for anyone unfamiliar with the way a traditional project management program works and how a plan is put together.
So if you're new to the world of project management and the use of Gantt charts, I recommend checking out Gantter.com first to teach yourself the fundamentals.
GanttProject is an open-source application written in Java. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, as long as the Java Virtual Machine runtime is installed on your computer. It can be launched directly from the GanttProject site; or you can download the installation file for your specific operating system and install the Java code to run as a standalone desktop program.
GanntProject has a number of features that set it off from other applications. For example, Gantter.com and most project management applications intentionally restrict the number of colors you're allowed to use to designate your plan's task bars. GanttProject lets you use whatever color you like for your bars, and also apply textures to each of them.
