I’ve spent the past few days playing around with Collabtive, the open source project management or collaboration application. I’ve been hooked using it because of it’s easy to use interface. It appears after all this time that somebody finally got it right with open source project management. Not only is the application totally usable, to top off all it’s amazing features it’s licensed under the GNU General Public License, so you know this project’s future looks bright.

There are 8 reasons why I think you are going to love Collabtive as an open source project management tool for your web projects. Collabtive is written in PHP and MySQL and works fine on all major web browsers. Collabtive is intended for small to medium sized businesses as well as freelancers of all kinds. Let’s take a look at the 8 things I love about Collabtive.

1. Perform All Tasks Quickly – The Main Interface

The main screen for each individual project allows you to quickly and easily perform a variety of tasks for your projects at the click of a button. This makes project management easy and takes no time to do. So you can spend more time on your actual project.

2. Project Milestones

Milestones are created for each individual project to help you track the overall progress of your project. You can break your project into individual milestones, each milestone having a deadline making sure it gets done in your desired amount of time.

3. Project Tasklists

Tasklists are a list of tasks that are assigned to individual milestones. This way you can make sure that everything you need done actually gets done. Through this tool in Collabtive you can provide better communication to your team members of what specifically needs to be done.

4. Project Users

Creating and assigning users to specific projects is so freakin’ easy with collabtive. There are three types of users. Admins, Clients, and Users. Each with their respective user privileges. As you can see with the screenshot, you can very easily assign and un-assign users to your projects.

5. Files Attached to Projects

One of the most common needs in project management applications is the ability to add files such as images, documents, spreadsheets etc. to those projects. This creates a higher level of collaboration as members of the team can so easily share file and communicate notes with those files. Collabtive makes it easy.

6. Track The Time Of All Efforts

The TimeTracker tool with Collabtive allows team members to track the time of all efforts they perform on each project. Each log through the TimeTracker is assigned to a specific task within each tasklist. So as the project manager you can see how long each individual task is taking.

7. Send Messages to Team Members

Message sending is so critical in a project collaboration environment. It’s sad that many small businesses and freelancers are still sending emails to each other. Using the Messaging tool in Collabtive allows everyone involved in the project, from Admin to developer to designer to the client, to send messages to each other quickly and to use those messages to help build the project more efficiently.

8. Import from Basecamp

Basecamp is probably the most common name associated with web-based project management applications. It’s a popular service based application to help you manage your projects with a variety of different tools. If you already have a Basecamp account and want to go the Open Source route, you can import all of your BaseCamp data into your new Collabtive self-hosted application.

There are some other really cool features other than these mentioned. There are RSS updates from projects, as well as email notifications to keep team members coming back to the app to update projects. Overall I find Collabtive to have a friendly, easy to use, and professional user interface (GUI) that makes the application pleasant to use.

Be sure to check out Collabtive and to try out the demo. Remember it’s fully Open Source licensed under the GNU General Public License so feel free to use it for commercial or personal use.

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