Project Tracking Software for Marketing Department

August 1, 2005 10:17 AM

We're looking for project tracking/resource management software for a small marketing department. What do you use, or what do you know of that's good? Alternately, what might we want to be sure to avoid?

We're a mixed environment (Mac/PC) in house creative shop. We've tried MS Project (WAY more than we needed), Excel Spreadsheets (a bit less than we needed), a custom built solution in FileMaker Pro (this also ended up being a little bit more than we needed and was a little too intrusive which led to early abandonment).

I'm looking at Basecamp which looks very interesting to me. Has anybody worked with this at all? Does it have any way to track the number of hours spent on a project? How is archival data handled. Everything I see in the screen shots seems to be focused on keeping people informed while a project is in production.

Is there anything similar or different that we should be looking at?

posted by willnot to work & money (4 comments total)

check out http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/

I've heard very good things.
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:10 PM on August 1, 2005

I've used basecamp, and it's fabulous. They don't yet support hours tracking. However, that is apparently a feature they want to add, and the easy workaround (if it's important to you that you have the data in one place) is to simply have people post messages on each project each day with the hours for that day. It's a kludge, but it works.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 9:06 PM on August 1, 2005

Thanks devilsbrigade and dirtynumbangelboy. I'm still open to suggestions, given that this will probably scrolling off the front page soon, here are a few other options I found while searching.

Copper: We need to play around a bit more, but I think this one will be our pick unless something better turns up. They have a free demo so you can get in and use the software.

I like the way it handles updates where you say what percent done you are, and how many hours you've worked since the last update. One big plus is that you can buy it outright instead of renting it month to month (the month-to-month thing makes Basecamp a bit of a harder sell). You also get the right to modify source code which is nice. A potential down side is that you need to install it, which may be a hardware expense.

RoboHead: The demo for this looks kind of interesting. It's probably more than we need though, and they don't tell you what the cost is anywhere that I could find on the site, so I'm guessing it's well out of our range. It's another rent it by the month kind of solution.

DotProject.net - this was linked out of another AskMe thread. It's open source which is nice, but there doesn't seem to be much polish. I guess we could add all of that after the fact, but I'm looking for something that will be quick and easy to use out of the gate.
posted by willnot at 10:24 PM on August 1, 2005 [1 favorite]

We have our own home grown system, but my colleagues use Ace Project and give it good marks for its ability to track hours and such.
posted by teddyb109 at 3:54 AM on August 3, 2005