www.projectmanagerplanet.com/tools/article.php/3718076
By Will Kelly December 21, 2007 Today’s project teams extend beyond the same cube farm, office building, and even corporate campus. As such, project management applications need to accommodate today’s project teams and project management tools are evolving from the corporate network to hosted Web tools accessible over the public Internet. Hosted PM applications can substitute for desktop, group, and enterprise project management applications and free up your IT support staff. This article provides an example of each class of hosted project management application. Inside Hosted Apps Hosted PM applications come with many benefits and some drawbacks depending on your organization. Comfort levels with third-party hosted solutions vary by organization and you’d do well take a pulse within your own organization when considering a hosted project management application. For example, many compliance programs like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) and COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission) require that an organization’s applications are secure within the corporate enterprise meaning a hosted project management tool is officially verboten. However, if your organization isn’t governed by compliance audits then a hosted project management tool can be appealing on multiple levels. This includes freeing your IT staff from maintaining and securing yet another application and having the ready capability to allow access to the project management tool to partners, contractors and others who may not have full-time access to their corporate network. Inside BaseCamp 37 Signals, a well-known developer of Web 2.0 productivity tools are the minds behind BaseCamp, a subscription-based project management tool that includes online storage for files, real-time chat, access for unlimited users and clients, SSL security, unlimited WriteBoards and the Max version of BaseCamp includes Free CampFire Premium, a real-time group chat service based on Web standards. One of BaseCamp’s appeals is its simple elegance and simplicity and because it is subscription-based, you can upgrade and downgrade your subscription as your organizations needs change. It’s also accessible to any authorized user with a Web browser and the solution isn’t tied to any project management or productivity school of thought. Secure file sharing has become an integral part of project management tools to secure project documents and other artifacts. Fee-based versions of BaseCamp include from 500MB to 500GB of online storage accessible to any user authorized to access the BaseCamp site. The pricing for BaseCamp ranges from free with the capability to manage one project to the $149/month Max subscription. Inside Zoho Projects Zoho is a leader in the growing Web Office market and their Zoho Projects complements their other Web Office offerings including the upcoming Zoho Business Web Office. Zoho Projects includes standard features like tasks and milestones offering you the ability to create tasks, assign owners, and specify deadlines to track. You can also associate tasks to milestones. The calendar enables you to view tasks, milestones, and meetings on a single page calendar view. It also includes a reporting tool with Gantt charts for at-a-glance status of the projects and a time tracking tool that can track time for each project work item. Making project information accessible to a range of audiences is becoming more critical as other team members have to step into real or ad hoc project management roles. Zoho takes a Web portal approach to Zoho Projects that should make project information and milestones more accessible to users outside of the project management office (PMO). Zoho Projects also includes secure file storage and sharing enabling project teams to upload and manage their project files securely in a central location. The pricing for Zoho Projects ranges from Free with the capability to manage one project with 100MB document storage space through the $80.00/month enterprise edition with unlimited projects and 25GB of document storage space. |
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