When it comes to small business project management, Basecamp by 37signals has been the king of the hill for some time. Now though, there is an exciting new player in the field: Open Atrium. It’s a Drupal based open source project management system somewhat like Basecamp, though with many more features.
Open Atrium is new on the scene, with beta 1 being released just 4 days ago – though it’s already rather polished and seems to work well. While there are some hiccups with the installer and a disappointing lack of documentation, it’s still very easy to install and takes only a few minutes to get running.
It has all the major features that you would expect, plus a few extras such as a twitter-like shoutbox system. Here are the highlights:
- Blogging
- Calendar
- Dashboard
- Document Storage
- Task Management
Being open source and self-hosted adds some nice benefits; unlimited customization, full control of your data, and my favorite: can be installed on a non-public web server. Having you project management system sit behind a VPN is a great way to avoid data leaks and embarrassments.
I’m still debating which is best, Basecamp or Open Atrium – but if you want to save some money, Open Atrium is worth looking into.
When I buy something, I expect support. When I buy something expensive, I expect really good support. That may be asking too much, but that’s just how I think. Now, when I contact the vendor for support, I expect to talk to somebody that understands the product. When I bring up an issue that gets me on a conference call with a Vice President and a Project Manager, I expect them to give me accurate data.
Update: I had a call with Ensafer’s CTO, Trygve Hardersen to discuss the issues I brought up, and what they can do about it. First, they updated the site so that downloads are now over HTTPS. He stated that the infrastructure that powers their service is separate from the website, and everything is over HTTPS. They are working on making documentation available, and hope to have the first documents available soon.
I’ve been a (fairly quiet) critic of WikiLeaks for a long time, the core of the mission I agree with – information should be free, and should be preserved – but the implementation is deeply flawed. But then, that’s not really news is it? Two and half years ago when I last wrote about WikiLeaks, I pointed out that Julian Assange was the organization’s biggest problem. So what do we have today?
Primum non nocere (first, do no harm) – an iconic phrase in modern medicine, yet also applicable to many other fields. This is something I wish more people would think about, developers especially – and primarily when writing new APIs. In general, developers don’t have an impressive history with security – quite frankly, developers suck. Seeing as I consider myself a developer, that’s painful to admit.
Chris Andrè Dale posted an interesting article some time ago that got me thinking: Why it’s easy being a hacker: A SQL injection case study – Chris pointed out the problems with educational material that developers are using, and just how bad the examples are.
I recently had an idea for a small web application, and seeing as I’ve not spent as much time as I’ve wanted to using Rails – I opted to build it the latest version of Rails. A decision that caused far more grief than I expected.
If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed VPS for those that don’t know), the seemingly simple task of getting a Rails 3 application up and running is actually quite complex.
