OpenProj is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 project management software

Project management software

Project management software is a term covering many types of software, including estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to...

 intended as a complete desktop replacement for Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software program, developed and sold by Microsoft, which is designed to assist a project manager in developing a plan, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.The application creates critical path...

, being able to open existing native Project files. It was developed by Projity in 2007. OpenProj runs on the Java Platform, allowing it to run on a variety of different operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s.

OpenProj moved out of beta with the release of Version 1.0, on January 10, 2008.

In late 2008 Projity was acquired by Serena Software

Serena Software

Serena Software Inc is US-based software company.Serena develops and markets products focused on managing change across information technology environments...

. As of early 2009 support for OpenProj and communication about development of OpenProj seem to have been suspended. However, there were active commits continuing to the CVS

Concurrent Versions System

The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

, indicating that a member of the open source community was improving the program and/or correcting technical issues. Whether or not the software remains open-source under these commercial conditions remains to be seen.

The current version includes:

• Earned Value
  Earned value management
  Earned value management is a project management technique for measuring project performance and progress in an objective manner. EVM has the ability to combine measurements of scope, schedule, and cost in a single integrated system. Earned Value Management is notable for its ability to provide...
  
   costing
• Gantt chart
  Gantt chart
  A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts...
  
  
• PERT
  Program Evaluation and Review Technique
  The Program ' Evaluation and Review Technique, commonly abbreviated PERT, is a statistical tool, used in project management, that is designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project...
  
   graph
• Resource Breakdown Structure
  Resource Breakdown Structure
  In project management, the resource breakdown structure is a hierarchical list of resources related by function and resource type that is used to facilitate planning and controlling of project work...
  
   (RBS) chart
• Task usage reports
• Work Breakdown Structure
  Work breakdown structure
  A work breakdown structure , in project management and systems engineering, is a deliverable oriented decomposition of a project into smaller components. It defines and groups a project's discrete work elements in a way that helps organize and define the total work scope of the project.A work...
  
   (WBS) chart

Popularity

It has been downloaded over 2,000,000 times in over 142 countries. Three months after the beta version release, on SourceForge an average of 60,000 copies a month were downloaded. With a SourceForge activity percentile of 99.964, at number 15 it was listed just ahead of the popular messaging application Pidgin (software)

Pidgin (software)

Pidgin is an open-source multi-platform instant messaging client, based on a library named libpurple. Libpurple has support for many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various services from one application.The number of Pidgin users was estimated to be over 3...

. In May 2008 the total number of downloads on SourceForge reached 500,000.

Comparison to MS Project

Compared to MS Project, which it closely emulates, OpenProj has a similar user interface (UI), and a similar approach to construction of a project plan: create an indented task list or work breakdown structure (WBS), set durations, create links (either by (a) mouse drag, (b) selection and then button-down, or (c) manually type in the 'predecessor' column), assign resources. The columns (fields) are the same as for MS Project. Users of the one software should be broadly comfortable using the other. Costs are the same: labour, hourly rate, material usage, and fixed costs: these are all provided.

However, there are small differences in the UI (comments apply to version 1.4), which take some adaptation for those familiar with MS Project, i.e. OpenProj can't link upwards with method (c), inserting tasks is more difficult than in MSProject, and OpenProj can't create resources on the fly (have to create them first in the resource sheet). There are also several more serious limitations with OpenProj, the chief of these being the unavailability of more detailed views and reports typical of MS Project. For example, though the fields exist for cost, there is no quick way to show them other than to manually insert them. This requires a relatively advanced user: someone who knows what the fields might be called and how to use them.

Bugs

As of version 1.4, bugs in the software generally only manifest for users who are attempting more advanced features. For example, tasks may mysteriously start at a certain time (they behave as if they have a 'Start no earlier than' constraint even though none exists, and the project start date is not a constraint), links show gaps, fixed cost for summary tasks neither sums nor is editable, etc. Sometimes these errors are solved by restarting the software, but others are persistent.

External links

• OpenProj
• OpenProj on Sourceforge
  SourceForge
  SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...