Kyle D. Skrinak

I blogged earlier about my move from dotproject (dp) to web2project; (w2p) read more there for background. The goodness continues. Whereas using dp allowed me to integrate my project tasks with company info, I have now eliminated  the need for slimtimer, a web app for tracking hours. Slimtimer is an excellent web app for tracking hours to activities and has excellent reporting features and I continue to highly recommend it. What bothered me with using slimtimer was cost and project integration. While it is free, the programmer fairly asks for donations. there are a number of alternatives (Quickbooks for example) that I can use to track project hours for free; while slimtimer is a solid, well-programmed application, it wasn’t worth my making a donation. Alas, I didn’t feel I was quid-pro-quo with the application’s programmer. Secondly, and more importantly (as it turns out) is the integration of task hours, task description against the specific task in my w2p application.

Where w2p doesn’t offer the same detailed start/stop hours tracker, the time recording offers “just enough” data to be usable. However, the integration of task hour recording with description and project info is critical to making it much more informative in the context of the overall project. Whereas I lose start/stop times, I gain recording the specific activities I executed ,which also allows me to make the project’s tasks more generic, thus reducing the documentation overhead while keeping the data relevant for billing and project summary documentation.

Score another point for w2p. The beauty of w2p is that it’s model has made project management for my company more easy to manage. The redesign by the w2p team has helped to reveal functional aspects that might have been available in dp but now make sense in the broader context of usage. I recently wowwed a client by setting up a project site for one of his projects in 30 minutes, with milestones established and gantt-charted. He immediately requested his internal IT guy to set up w2p on their internal server. There’s more functionality that I haven’t accessed (yet) but does seem very useful depending on the client and project requirements (forums, file storage, calendaring), although I rely heavily on Google’s Calendar; maybe it’s time for a rethink on that?

If you’re looking for a project management application, with excellent support for a small core team; check w2p out.