Open Source Project Management Software Saves Money
By Ray Myers, Jr., PMP
Open source project management applications provide a cost effective alternative to expensive commercial applications. What does cost effective mean? How about free, in most cases. The open source applications can be downloaded, installed, tested, and used for commercial purposes without having to buy any licenses. That’s right, for free, and that includes the source code as well.
Open source proponents frequently claim that it offers significant benefits when compared to the usual commercial products; open source is reliable, stabile, cost effective, flexible, and supported to name a few benefits.
Open source developers are motivated by many factors; however peer review may exert the most influence on the quality of the applications. Think about it. How much extra effort do you put into a presentation when you know your audience will be a group of your peers? Similarly, open source developers are motivated by pride and peer-recognition rather than a development plan provided by a marketing department.
While the developers make the software and updates available for free, they occasionally charge for support, if needed. However, the open source code is freely available and organizations are not limited to obtaining support from the authors. There is no restriction on other suppliers learning enough about the software to provide adequate support, if desired.
Not convinced? What do you know Linux, Perl, Apache and MySQL? You may be surprised to learn that they are all open source software packages and that are widely used in commercial and Internet applications today.
Take a moment and look at the following open source applications. You may be pleased by the potential savings.
Checkout These Free Open Source Tools
The Power of Open Workbench
Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. Already the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.
GanttProject
Free tool for project scheduling and management. GanttProject is a cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX, it is free and its code is open source.
OpenOffice.org
A credible rival to MS Office, OpenOffice.org includes powerful applications for making text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, and databases, as well as HTML and XML documents.
OpenProj
OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. OpenProj has been downloaded over 1,250,000 times in over 142 countries and has quickly become one of the most popular open source applications. If you are managing a group project, consider Projects On Demand. If you want a free replacement to commercial desktop software, then OpenProj is perfect. OpenProj is also now included with Star Office in Europe. It’s available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows, and it’s free.
TaskJuggler
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks.
EGroupware
eGroupWare is free open source groupware software intended for businesses from small to enterprises. Its primary functions allow users to manage contacts, appointments, projects and to-do lists.
About the Author: Ray Myers, Jr. is a PMP certified project manager with over 20 years experience planning and managing technology projects. Contact Ray at www.pmservicesnw.com
