Project management the open source way

Once you’ve created a task list, you can populate it with tasks, which is also an easy thing to do. Press the ‘Add task’ button, fill in the required fields, assign the task to a user and press Add. When a task in the list is completed, mark it as done by clicking on the Close button and the system moves the task into the ‘Finished tasks’ section. When all the tasks in a given task list are closed, the entire task list is moved into the ‘Finished task lists’ section. To keep track of your workload, you can use the progress meter in the dashboard.

The Messages section acts as a forum where users can communicate with each other. Despite its basic functionality, the Messages section sports a few nifty features. When creating a message, you can attach it to a specific milestone, which makes it easier to locate threads related to certain parts of the project. You can also attach a file from the Files section to your message. This feature can come in handy when you are collaborating on a document with several users. To make it easier to find the message later, you can add multiple tags to it in the Tags field. Finally, the Message section sports its own RSS feed, so users can subscribe to it to stay abreast of the project’s activity. In addition to that, you can export messages as a nicely formatted PDF file.

As the name suggests, the Files section acts as a repository for storing project-related files. Although it doesn’t offer any advanced features like version tracking, it can be useful when you want to share documents and files with other project users. You can organise documents and files into folders and specify which users can see them based on their roles.

Collabtive comes with a simple time-tracking tool, which can help you to keep tabs on the time you spend on specific tasks and on the project in general. The tool allows you to enter a start and end time, and you can then see a list of the created time entries in the Timetracker section. Collabtive also allows you to export the time data as a spreadsheet or a PDF document.

To sum up, let’s take a quick look at what your Collabtive workflow may look like:
1. Populate Collabtive with users and define their roles.
2. Switch to the Desktop, and add projects.
3. Navigate to the project dashboard, switch to the Milestones section and break your project into milestones.
4. For each milestone, create a task list and populate it with tasks.
5. In the Files section, add files and documents to the project.
6. Use the Timetracker tool to keep track of time spent on specific tasks.
7. Use the Messages section to communicate with other project users.
8. Close the completed tasks and milestones.

As mentioned before, Collabtive is not the most advanced open source project management solution out there. But it provides all the essential features wrapped into a slick and intuitive interface – all of which make it a perfect fit for individual users and small workgroups and teams. Give it a try; you might find out that it’s exactly what you were looking for.

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