My SQL/PHP shareware programs for tracking projects?

April 28, 2008 11:12 AM

Moving an Excel spreadsheet schedule into MySQL/PHP

The group I work for keeps a getting too big to navigate Excel spreadsheet of all of th projects we're currently working on. Other groups in the department need to start getting access to this information (currently on a network drive), so I'm looking into tools for putting it up on the Intranet.

My thinking is that it's not representing actual processes/projects, so tools like MS Project or ActiveCollab would be overkill. We just need a nice basic web accessible database. Other groups use MySQL/PHP shareware for their projects, so I'm on the lookout for something similar. All it needs to track is the project name, person in the department responsible for it, chargeback #, & deadline date. Pretty simple metadata fields. We're a small part of the larger overall process, so it doesn't need to be a formal Project Management tool.

I'm pretty sure our IT department would want something off the shelf instead of requesting custom development work, so I'm looking for any shareware products that might meet our needs and be acceptable for IT.

posted by gov_moonbeam to technology (4 comments total)

You may be able to get away with just using PHPMyAdmin to access the tables directly for a start.

After you get comfortable with the organization, you can pretty it up with some web templates and such, but your needs are really as simple as they appear to be, this might be sufficient.

Prerequisites are PHP and MySQL installed and properly configured. There are many, many tutorials on this.
posted by odinsdream at 12:00 PM on April 28, 2008

You might also be able to use a wiki for this. Most of them let you put some markup on a page to represent a table. Lots of wikis implemented in PHP/MySQL.

If you need to get a little bit more project management-y, you could look at Trac, which is implemented in Python and has its own database.
posted by Emanuel at 5:47 PM on April 28, 2008

You can also use Drupal for this sort of thing. Combining CCK and Views gives you pretty great database-like features. If you choose Drupal, for the moment I recommend version 5 rather than 6, just because CCK and Views are not 100% perfect in version 6 yet. However, I know people who are using 6 (with CCK and Views) quite happily.
posted by kristi at 9:33 AM on April 29, 2008

Oh - and Node Import lets you import data quite nicely (again, Drupal 5 only).
posted by kristi at 9:34 AM on April 29, 2008