Project Management
TimeGlider, A Free Web-Based Timeline Software For Creating Project Planning And Much More…
TimeGlider is a data-driven interactive timeline application built on the (Adobe) Flash platform. You can “grab” the timeline and drag it left and right, and zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or just hours. TimeGlider allows you to create event-spans so that you can see durations and how they overlap. Being web-based, TimeGlider lets you collaborate and share easily.
You can create timelines about the last year of your family, the last century of world events, or about pre-historical (bce/bc) times. You can try the application here without needing to sign up.
TimeGlider interface is draggable and zoomable: navigating TimeGlider is a lot like using familiar applications like Google or Yahoo maps. TimeGlider allows you to show the time span of events, indicated by a band of color. Simply enter the start date and an end date.
Timelines that zoom are tricky: If they are dense with events, they stack up and get cluttered. But with TimeGlider, this can be easily managed by assigning an importance level (from 1 to 100) to each event. As one zooms in, certain things can emerge that weren’t visible at a wider scope.
A free account comes with
- a really cool application for visualizing history and project planning!
- a basic image library & uploader
- linking and embedding tools for sharing your timelines
Onyaka, The Simple And Free Staff Scheduling And Planning Software
Onyaka is an online staff time planning software service that takes all the pain out of staff scheduling. Onyaka provides you with easy to use staff scheduling software, with no downloads, no expensive license fees, and no installation hassle.
It has a simple drag and drop interface and you can use all of the features absolutely free. As Onyaka is online application that’s why you can use it from everywhere without any restriction on standard web browser.
You can click here to see onyaka in action.
5 simple steps to setup it for you!
- Start a new project
- Add your staff (just names and email addresses: no shifts, no templates, no complicated stuff!)
- Add skills (actually just skill names)
- Drag-and-drop skills you want covered straight into the calendar.
- And That’s It…
OpenGoo, An Open Source And Easy To Use Web Office
OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organization to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents. You and your team can create and collaborate on:
- Text documents
- Spreadsheets (coming soon)
- Presentations
- Task Lists
- E-mails
- Calendars
- Web Links
- Contacts
OpenGoo gives you all the tools to manage the work of all the divisions of your company. You can plan and manage all your projects, easily following the status of every task.
There is the mashup approach. This means OpenGoo takes many existing OpenSource projects, and “glues” them by developing tools to easily integrate them and make them look and feel like one single application.
Yes, there is the classical approach, where they build a new piece of software. This will be the case when no OpenSource alternative convinces the OpenGoo team.
It seems, they aim to develop a system that is:
- Easy to install
- Cross-platform
- Secure
- Open Source
- Easily Extendable
Agility! An Approach to Fight Global Recession
Most of the countries all over the world are going through the phase of economic recession. Many old and big companies have already been brought down on their knees to bite the dust. Many companies as well as countries have become bankrupt or are on the verge of it. Millions and millions of people have lost their jobs. Many people have lost millions and billions of dollars. People in general are scared and fearsome. This is not the first time that the global economy is going through recession and this is also not the last time. There is a pattern involved in it. On an average it is happening after every 8-10 years.
Information Technology industry too takes the impact of global recession and a difference in the average IT investment can be monitored during the times of recession. Analysis of IT investment shows that Information Processing equipment and Software investment increased a modest 5% in 1990 recession before taking a major jump to 15% in 1992. However the 2001 recession, in contrast with the decline in 1990, was much harder on IT spending because there was a great deal of overspending on IT equipment and software in the latter part of 1990s. The need for extra hardware and software for Y2K remediation ended abruptly in 2000. The 2001 recession was somewhat unique in that this huge overhang of excess IT equipment needed to be burned off before investment levels could recover. This intensified the negative impact of the 2001 recession on IT spending. However the current recession bears remarkable similarities to the recession of 1990, which was led by the financial sector. It also bears some similarities in IT spending patterns during the 2001 recession. In either case, over the past 20 years the negative impact on IT spending has never lasted more than two years. Therefore, the analysis shows IT spending will remain weak through 2009, with a recovery in 2010.
IT Agility
A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore’s law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.
Agile practices enable teams to build less, but return the same value by focusing on early delivery of the features that have the highest business value and not wasting money on the features that don’t.
IT agility is driven by three major innovations: agile development, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 social networks. However, without agility in development and software releases, the innovations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are elusive.
Agile Process Model
Agile development is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.
The following illustration depicts a typical agile development model.
Agile methods choose to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as ‘timeboxes’) which typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration is worked on by a team through a full software development cycle, including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing when a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This helps to minimize the overall risk, and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Documentation is produced as required by stakeholders. An iteration may not add enough functionality to warrant releasing the product to market, but the goal is to have an available release (with minimal bugs) at the end of each iteration. Multiple iterations may be required to release a product or new features.
Team composition in an agile project is usually cross-functional and self-organizing without consideration for any existing corporate hierarchy or the corporate roles of team members. Team members normally take responsibility for tasks that deliver the functionality of an iteration. They decide for themselves how they will execute during an iteration.
Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents, when working in the same location, or in different locations but having video contact daily, communicating by videoconferencing, voice, e-mail etc.
Most agile teams are located in a single open office to facilitate such communication. Team size is typically small (5-9 people) to help make team communication and team collaboration easier. Larger development efforts may be delivered by multiple teams working toward a common goal or different parts of an effort. This may also require a coordination of priorities across teams.
No matter what development disciplines are required, each agile team will contain a customer representative. This person is appointed by stakeholders to act on their behalf and makes a personal commitment to being available for developers to answer mid-iteration problem-domain questions. At the end of each iteration, stakeholders and the customer representative review progress and re-evaluate priorities with a view to optimizing the return on investment and ensuring alignment with customer needs and company goals.
Agile methods emphasize working software as the primary measure of progress. Combined with the preference for face-to-face communication, agile methods usually produce less written documentation than other methods. In an agile project, documentation and other project artifacts all rank equally with working product. Stakeholders are encouraged to prioritize them with other iteration outcomes based exclusively on business value perceived at the beginning of the iteration.
Enterprise agile adoption roadmap
Like any mission-critical systems or initiative, you need a vision and roadmap to steer your adoption and rally the troops. The roadmap for an enterprise to adopt agility is described in the following illustration.
There are three keys to effectively managing this process:
- Work incrementally, in an agile fashion, through the steps and gain proficiency before widespread scaling.
- Develop a vision/roadmap and change backlog with key executives before you attempt to move up to step 3 and beyond.
- Share the vision and roadmap with the entire organization and manage the rollout in a collaborative fashion with complete transparency.
Many of these rollouts have started with a grassroots effort to get to Step 1 and Step 2. With the help of external coaching and parallel tool rollouts, many companies have taken more aggressive, “flash-cut” moves with top-down leadership and investment to jump to step 3 in the roadmap within months.
Flash-cut approaches
Given the pressure and opportunity of this crisis, as well as the increasing number of public proof points showing how large organizations can quickly transition to agile, you might be thinking about your ability to do accelerate your adoption and capture savings in 2009 from your efforts. There are three things to heed while considering this:
- Adopting agile needs complete management buy-in and a true sense of urgency. What is it going to take for your management team to get buy-in to adopt Agile on a major portion of your organization?
- You are going to need a strategic partner to help you manage this organization change effort. I do not know a company that followed the flash-cut approach without an outside coaching or consulting firm. As a result, you will have to budget for this investment and the time to choose and schedule them. These partners will help you build the organization capacity for agile while also supporting the professional development of your middle managers as the organization becomes flatter and leaner.
- This is a whole system change from a world of plan-driven to value-driven ideas. As a result, you will see immediate changes in your process, organization, and technology. This transition will set up a culture of continuous improvement and even drive changes in your overall development and business strategies. To make this transition go well, you are going to need to implement a collaborative project management solution to provide visibility across your development teams.
Conclusion
We don’t know how long or how deep this recession will be. Belt-tightening and staffing cuts almost seem inevitable. You can either reduce costs by just cutting your budget, or you can use this opportunity to make systemic changes in your business. Enterprise IT agility is proven to do that — more so than investments in technology point solutions that only have a point in time savings. Most important, this approach will help ensure the savings from today’s cuts do not create worse problems in the long run.
Guest post by Muhammad Usama Alam, who is a software engineer and web developer with over 8 years of experience in designing and developing business solutions for enterprise. You can follow him on twitter.
TaskJuggler, A Modern And Powerful Open Source Project Management Tool
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planing 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. TaskJuggler is Open Source software licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.
TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constraints that you have provided. The built-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. The flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.
Features and Highlights
- Manages tasks, resources and costs in one package
- Automatic resource leveling, tasks conflict resolutions, and task filtering
- Comprehensive and flexible views and reports so you can find the information you need when you need it
- Built-in templates to get you started (you can also save your own schedules as templates for future use)
- Project tracking and status reporting
- Graphical User Interface to conveniently edit your projects, view and generate Gantt charts and reports
- Unlimited number of scenarios (baselines) of the same project for what-if analysis
- CSV data export for exchange with Office Suites
- Risk analysis
- Project breakdown and management team support
- Flexible working hours and vacation handling
- Support for shift working
- Multiple time zone support
- Tasks may have initial costs, finishing costs
- Resources may have running costs
- Support for profit/loss analysis
- HTML and XML report generation
- Powerful project description syntax with macro support
- Support for central resource allocation database
- Generation of iCal files for data exchange with standard productivity tools
13 Most Useful Free Scripts That You Should Know
Today, we are publishing another list of 13 Most Useful Free Scripts and Applications that are very helpful for you to process your daily work. They are too much simple in terms of their usage because many of these do not need to have special infrastructure but you can download them and setup on your personal PC or incorporate with your websites or blogs. Whether you are designer, developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc. But we make sure to add something interesting for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thought here.
You are welcome if you want to share more free and simple scripts that are useful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
I will appreciate if you can spread the word via Digg, Stumbleupon and other social media websites, Thank you.
Chevereto is a free script, written in php, that lets you set up your own image hosting on your web server. It is your hosting and your rules, say goodbye to the closures and restrictions. Currently the code is very tender, and is in its early versions.
osTicket is an attractive alternative to higher-cost and complex customer support systems; simple, lightweight, reliable, open source, and easy to setup and use. The best part is, it’s completely free.
More and more people are using social bookmarks. Such services gives a great way to keep track of their own bookmarks, independently from the used browser and computer. This script gives you an easy way of implementing social bookmark links into your own website.
FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It’s easy to use and degrades gracefully on all older, non-supporting browsers. This is very quick to setup (only two lines of markup needed). It also numerous customization options.
The PHP Web Stat offers you a highly configurable web tracker and detailed real-time web stat script. You will be able to analyze and monitor all visitors of your website. Our script is totally FREE and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Zoki Poll is a simple and high-tech poll system, based on AJAX and XML. It can be simply integrated in almost every site. It is written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript with small back end files in PHP.
phpWatch is a general purpose service monitor that is able to send notifications of outages via e-mail or text-message (SMS). The purpose of this system is two-fold: it allows administrators to easily check the status of many different services running on any number of servers and also allows developers to interface with the query and notification APIs.
Star Rating System is an Ajax based free PHP script that lets you add star rating feature on your website or blog. This is really easy to install and uses MySQL database for speed and reliability.
XtraUpload has all the features you would expect from a file Hosting Script. Free users as well as premium users have the ability to upload files but premium users get a lot more features such as viewing files, instantly downloading files and getting the URL’s of the files they have uploaded. You can also specify the file types, sizes along with many other options.
BugNET is an issue tracking and project issue management solution built using the ASP.NET web application framework. Email notifications, reporting and per project configuration of fields and values allows efficient management of bugs, feature requests, and other issues for projects of any scale.
AjaXplorer is an easy-to-install file explorer for remotely managing files on a web server. Its “rich client” layout and actions make it accessible to any end-user for a variety of purposes: file management/sharing, photo gallery, code browsing, etc.
Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux.
Visión is a simple PHP, Javascript, and CSS Photo (Image) Viewer. As you place images into the specified images folder, Visión automatically updates. Visión pre-loads images, is easy to setup, and is cross-browser compatible.
11 Premium But Free And Useful Web Apps For Designers
In past, we have listed various free web apps that are really useful for any one of you and specially for designers. Today, we are listing 11 Premium But Free Web Apps For Designers that are not only for designers and every one of you will probably love to use. Whether you are designer, developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc. But we make sure to add something interesting for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features and functionality. Just take a look at them and share your thought here.
You are welcome if you know and want to share more free web apps that are really simple but useful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
Create A Free Flash Website, Free MySpace Layouts & Flash MySpace Layouts
With Wix you can create a free website or make free MySpace layouts and Flash MySpace layouts. It’s the simpler, faster, better way to build & design on the web.
Online Invoicing, Time Tracking And Expense Service
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional.
An Ultimate Stop For Free Online Surveys
Free survey software for online surveys, web surveys, email surveys. Free Online survey software for customer satisfaction surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, market research surveys.
Makes Decisions Faster And Easier For Businesses
Zapproved is a lightweight Web tool that makes group decision-making faster, easier and more accountable. It is a unique solution that introduces peer-to-peer and organizational techniques to improve the process of building consensus.
Free File Hosting For MP3, Videos, Documents
FileDropper’s beauty is in its simplicity. It has one click file hosting where you simply click on the upload button and select your file. After the file is uploaded you are taken to the page where the file is hosted. If the file is an image, it shows the image directly on the page for easier sharing. Upload size is an impressive 5 GB.
Project Management Meets CRM For Serious Business
JobBlogs is a collaborative workspace application tailored to work out universal team challenges - contacts, projects, plans, activities, tasks, schedules, organize them in no time and track them during the work flow.
Easy, Open, Affordable Web Conferences
DimDim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.
Website Analytics, Realtime Web Stats And Web Counter
W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them.
Code Collaboration For Web Developers
Springloops is a unique source code management tool focused on web development teams. It allows you to code in parallel and share your code safely concentrated on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files.
Sending Large Files Has Never Been Easier!
Filemail is a great free solution to send large size files to anyone. You can send upto 2gb size files with filemail. You will just need upload one or multiple files you want to send to the filemail. Files are encrypted on the servers using a 128bit AES algorithm to ensure security and privacy.
RescueTime is time management software that helps individuals and businesses understand how they spend their time, and provides tools to help them spend it more productively.
Onehub Provides Everything You Need To Share Business Information Easily And Securely
Onehub is a web application that provides everything you need to easily and securely share business information and files with partners, customers, coworkers, and suppliers. Onehub is not your typical complicated collaboration software. Instead, it’s fun and easy to use and can help take your growing business to the next level. Best of all, it’s on demand so you don’t have to install or maintain expensive server software. Nor do you have to be an IT genius to use it – all you need is an internet connection.
You can choose from the many Onehub “widgets” to help you organize and manage your projects. Your team benefit from having information in a central location so they can work smarter be more productive than ever.
You can
- Easily collect and manage documents, schedules, tasks, and more.
- Brand and design your hubs to meet your unique business needs and style.
- Share information with coworkers, partners, and customers.
Visualize Your Activities And Manage Your Time More Efficiently With Slife
Slife is a time and activity analytics application for both Mac and Windows that automatically keeps track of where you spend your time on your computer.
Slife observes as you interact with applications, documents, email and web sites and then displays detailed statistics of your computer usage in a set of intuitive and easy to use visualizations.With Slife, you can finally understand where you are spending your time and energy, and focus on what really matters.
Features
- Slife tracks your usage of applications, documents and web pages automatically.
- Slife provides 6 visual interfaces that let you analyze and visualize your computer time and activities like never before.
- Sometimes it might be useful to associate the utilization of applications, documents and pages with tasks.
- Slife lets you specify time goals for your activities.
11 Useful Open-Source Apps You Should Know About
Today, we are listing another collection of open-source applications that you probably want to know to use in your daily life or did not know before. You may not find them between the top of the list projects and many of projects are not listed here but over all the list has variety of projects for every one to run their business process in a much cost effective way. This is the list of 11 Useful Open-Source Apps You Should Know About.
You are welcome to share if you know more Open-Source Applications that our readers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed.
You would be interested in these older posts
11 Free Windows Programs Alternatives For Linux
19 Most Essential Open Source Applications That You Probably Want To Know
17 Wonderful Free Tools To Make Designers Lives Easier!
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use!
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Love To Use!
21 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use Every Day!
23 Free And Online Web Based Applications Specially If You Are Designer Or Developer
6 Free Tools To Help You Run Windows Applications On Linux
15 Free Tools For Mac OS X You Should Bookmark
Free and open source human resource management software with rich features and easy to use interface. It provides a perfect platform for re-engineering and aligning your HR processes along with the organizational goals.
Magento is the eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry. It’s modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility means your business is no longer constrained by your eCommerce platform.
Kaltura is the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction and collaboration. Kaltura enables sites to integrate advanced interactive rich-media functionalities.
Concrete5 is a content management system. Concrete5 is easy for site owners to use, flexible for developers to work with, and runs a wide variety of powerful websites.
Tellmatic is the newsletter machine that is a PHP based script to send newsletters. Use a generic browser like Seamonkey or Firefox to comfortably manage your addresses, forms and newsletters online.
MindTouch Deki is the most robust and popular enterprise collaboration platform. With MindTouch Deki your enterprise can improve productivity with wiki collaboration, build gorgeous and engaging community portals, create and collaborate around dashboards, dynamic reports and mashups with social enterprise collaboration.
PostBooks is a full-featured, fully-integrated accounting, ERP, and CRM system, based on the award winning xTuple ERP Suite. It provides the ultimate in power and flexibility for a range of businesses and industries.
GroupOffice helps you to take your office online, share projects, calendars, files and e-mail online with co-workers and clients. Easy to use and fully customizable, Group-Office takes online colaboration to the next level.
Inforama is an Open Source document automation system. Use it to create document templates which are merged with data at runtime to create professional, high-quality PDF documents.
Support Incident Tracker (or SiT!) is a Free Software/Open Source (GPL) web based application which uses PHP and MySQL for tracking technical support calls/emails. Manage contacts, sites, technical support contracts and support incidents in one place.
VMukti is leading Asterisk/ Yate enabled web video conferencing application for Web / PSTN. It is world’s first open source mashable PBX and meeting platform for home and office having features like multipoint audio/ video, desktop sharing, whiteboard.
