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.
Like jxProject, OpenProj lets you assign tasks with work times that run for less than one hour -- down to one minute.
But OpenProj is missing the one user interface feature that I really like in GanttProject, in which clicking a task bar highlights the corresponding name in the task list. (jxProject lacks this feature as well.) I hadn't realized how truly helpful this was until I went over the details of my project as rendered in OpenProj to mentally check off and review the task steps in my project, from start to finish.
A last big plus for OpenProj is that it successfully opened every plan file saved in the Microsoft Office Project format that I used in these tests. The other project management applications on this list usually had problems importing Office Project files, if they had the ability to do so directly at all (without the need to first export the file to XML).
As its name implies, Open Workbench is yet another open-source project management program. It runs only on a Windows computer with the Java Virtual Machine Runtime installed. The company backing Open Workbench sells online training for $150 to get you up and running. Otherwise, this application is free to use, although you have to go through the minor hassle of registering for a user account at the Open Workbench Web site.
Open Workbench cannot open files saved in any of the Microsoft Office Project file formats. It accepts only XML files and its own proprietary file format. Fortunately, Open Workbench managed to import all of the XML files created by Office Project that I threw at it.
In its default settings, Open Workbench renders your project plan as a basic Gantt chart, with no labels on the task bars. Like OpenProj, you can adjust the duration or position on the schedule of a bar by simply clicking and dragging it. But also like OpenProj, clicking a bar in the Gantt chart doesn't highlight the corresponding task or resource name in the task or resource list. (I don't think I'm the only one who finds this type of feature awfully useful when reviewing your plan.)
Its main display (under the Gantt chart screen) is split into six sections, which show the chart, task list, duration of tasks, calendar, resources, and the scheduled availability of your resources. All of these sections will resize respective to one another when you click and drag their borders. This is one of the stronger aspects of Open Workbench compared with the other project managers covered here, mainly because you can see most of the data tied to your plan without needing to click away from the main Gantt chart. This helps to give you the "whole picture" of your plan while you're either building or reviewing it, and I found this all-in-one visual display helpful in teaching myself how to use Open Workbench.
