“No More DotProject,” and “Where Have I Been?”
We’re primed to launch 3 customers in the coming week, which always makes the boss happy. The task of keeping track of all outstanding work has slowly begun to make sense to me. dotProject was working out for me (alone) for 2 or 3 weeks, but as I was filling in all the information about our clients and our contacts, I realized that the little annoyances with the interface would be too much for the 2 primary people I work with. Essentially, I did my best to use dotProject while pretending to be my boss, and again while pretending to be my development partner. Both times I became frustrated and gave up. It’s worth noting that 2 other project management systems have been unable to captivate my cohorts (and me).
I can imagine a project management system that would work for us. It would be something like the Firefox to dotProject’s Netscape. In dotProject, when I’m adding a contact, I need to choose from a dropdown of companies that have all been added to the companies table to fill in the person’s company. Adding every company with which we have contact to the companies table sucks for two reasons: 1) It’s extra work, and it’s unnecessary; and more notably 2) all of those companies will end up on every company dropdown all over dotProject, potentially making it much harder to select our own company as the primary for each project. Frankly, I either want less normalized data, or I just want a project management system that is designed to assume that only one company is doing the work. This is only an example of what bugs me about dotProject; the general, pervasive problem is that it tries to do too much, and ends up with a really obtuse interface.
With AJAX maturing, I see great things ahead for open-source, web-based enterprise software. In the case of project managment, I’m gonna have to do without a software solution for a while. For the time being, my overused notebook and the wiki are going to be my trusted repositories for task and project information. With practice, I’ve learned I can swing it this way. Few or no balls are being dropped now that I’m in my position, and that makes me feel pretty good.
In other news:
If I’m not forced to move out of my current office before UPS comes through with my books on Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails, I’ll be a happy man.
I’m looking for a new apartment. There is a beautiful 4-bedroom for next to nothing that I’ve been dreaming about, but the broker won’t seem to return my phone calls. Really, I could move anywhere. Thankfully, I don’t think the world will come crashing down if I don’t find myself a place by October 1st. Still, it’s a stressful process, and I’ll be relieved when it’s over. As it stands, I can’t really get anything done at home. When I live in a new place, my home office will become the development headquarters for the company I work for (Hey, we’re still small! At least they’ve begun subsidizing my health insurance), and that will make me better equipped to work on my pet projects after work.
I don’t know if I’ve ever adequately described my office before, but I work in someone else’s home office, and have since March. However, that someone else is no longer working in his home office, which leaves me working by myself. Listening to Rhapsody all day and singing along in my solitude is either saving my sanity or proving that I have none. At this very moment, I’m familiarizing myself with the post-Vitalogy Pearl Jam albums. Not too shabby.
And finally, if you like to concern yourself with the overall trends that are shaping the near and distant future, you should go see what the venerable DeWitt has to say about IE 7, the future of web search, and the decentralization of the web.







September 23rd, 2005 at 3:20 pm
well, if singing along with the music by yourself in a home office is an indication of insanity, i’m pretty much completely nuts ;)
once you’ve hit the post-Vitalogy albums, you might want to check out the live shows they posted - they’re excellent.
September 24th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Have you looked at basecamp? I got frustrated dealing with dotProject, finding it overly complex for trying to manage small projects. I’m finding basecamp pretty useful though. And it couldn’t be simpler. http://www.basecamphq.com/
September 25th, 2005 at 11:08 am
I’m a core development team member for dotProject and we’re currently working to clean up major parts of the UI.
Currently there are only *very* select places where AJAX is being used, but we’re steadily rolling it out to more places and I have an overall agenda to make the entire app more CSS-based and table-less. The Section 508 compliance is also completely lacking.
If you’d be willing to talk with me and enumerate your biggest annoyances, I can see if they’re already on our list or should be on our list.
November 30th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
I have had the same frustrations and have written a new front end (set of PHP scripts) to DotProject tables that is much cleaner and simpler… but now it needs to be finished and AJAXed. Any volunteers?
haloiq (at) gmail (dot) com
November 30th, 2007 at 2:14 am
Ran into this blog and we are using dotProject and find similar issues. Was wondering whether you found a solution that works for you.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
-Al