| Original author(s) | Philip Greenspun, Frank Bergmann, Klaus Hofeditz |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Project-Open Development Team |
| Stable release | 4.0 / May 12, 2011 |
| Operating system | Windows, Linux |
| Platform | OpenACS, PostgreSQL |
| Available in | English, Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish and Turkish |
| Type | ERP, Service Management,Project Management |
| License | various[1] |
| Website | http://www.project-open.org/ |
Project-Open (styled "]project-open[") is a web-based Project Management application created by an open-source project team based in Spain and Germany.
Contents |
Top-down/Bottom-up project planning: Projects can consist of an arbitrary number of sub-projects and tasks. Using a top-down approach, a projects' total budget is split over a number of subprojects. In terms of financial estimations, the system indicates if the sum of planned units for each task in a subproject is beyond its estimated budget. Using a bottom-up approach, a group of tasks can be aggregated to a sub-project, and multiple subprojects can form a main project. The budget of the main project is calculated based on the estimations made on a task level.
Resource Management: Based on resource assignments defined on a project level, a resource report indicates availability, or oversubscription, of resources across all open projects.
Project completion tracking: Each task owner reports task completeness. A weighted total completeness is calculated by the system.
Export to/import from OpenProj, GanttProject and Microsoft Project: Projects can be exported and further edited using either of the three desktop applications. The results than can be re-imported.
Project templates: New projects can be created based on existing projects marked as templates.
IT Helpdesk: The IT Helpdesk manages the lifecycle of tickets. For each ticket type, a workflow is defined allowing configurable routing of incidents through the organization. This way the module allows the management of Incidents, Request for Change, Feature Requests, Software Bugs and other events that require life-cycle management. Collected data provides results for Key Performance Indicators and Business Intelligent Reporting, supporting management decisions.
Configuration Database: Configuration Management is supported by an integrated CMDB that ensures transparency of changes performed and provides real-time information of Configuration Items managed.
Nagios Integration: Result of Nagios scans and notifications feed the IT Helpdesk and CMDB.
Timesheet Management allows tracking of time on project tasks and tickets. Several reports are available to extract time-sheet data and make it available to supervisors or HR staff based on the integrated permission system. A pre-configured workflow allows supervisors to confirm time sheet data entered by subordinates.
Internal/external costs: Besides time-sheet costs, the system also allows tracking other project expenses, such as costs for travel, accommodation, etc. A pre-configured workflow allows the creation of "expense bundles" that would need to be confirmed before these costs are considered in the projects profit and loss calculation.
Invoices: Invoices can be created based on various criteria (planned/billable/logged units). This process is supported by a wizard. Also other financial documents, such as Provider Bills and Quotes are created semi-automatically, based on data about customers and projects managed by the system.
Cost Centers: The cost-center module allows assignments of costs to cost centers across projects.
Financial Reporting: Several financial reporting are available to determine profit and loss, cash flow, and cost-effectiveness of operations. Data cubes provide data-warehouse-like reporting, giving the user the option to select dimensions.
File Manager: File Managers are used to connect arbitrary files to principal business objects such as customers, clients, users and projects. Permissions can be set on a folder level.
Wiki: A wiki with Media_wiki syntax allows to associate wiki pages with projects, customer or users.
Forum: Forum supports project collaboration. Several thread types are available. For each contribution permissions can be set. Some types provide basic workflow support.
Full text search engine: A user can search across all data stored in the system. Results depend on access permissions of items found.
Absence Management: Users can enter their absences. A pre-configured workflow is available routing the inquiry to the users supervisor.
Unified employee record: Employee data that can be managed is available to HR managers.
Skill Management: This module allows the management of user skills. Categories and attributes therein are configurable. Users can manage their skills themselves if permission is given. Supervisors can confirm or deny skills set by a user.
Unified customer record: A unified customer record contains relevant information about customers, such as contact information, financial data, past projects, etc.
Email campaigns: Email campaigns can be performed.
Email integration: Emails can be imported from a mail server and will be auto-assigned to users and projects.
Pre-sales Support: Forum and additional dynamic fields helps managing the pre-sales phase of a project.
Project-Open has been built based on the work of Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita. Frank Bergmann took this system and added extensions for the management of translation companies in 2003. In 2003 the project was published on Sourceforge,[2] and Klaus Hofeditz joined the team. In 2009 the application had been extended by an ITSM Service Desk, Configuration Management Database and a Nagios integration to support IT Management processes.
Community support is provided through Internet forums[3] at Sourceforge.net.[3] Professional support is provided by the Project-Open core team and more than 40 IT service organizations. As of December 2009, the Project-Open community page had more than 10,000 registered users.
The Project-Open core team is currently working on a first alpha of version 4.0 that will be based on the most recent OpenACS version 5.6.