This week I came across Epiware, an open source document and project management solution. As far as I can tell, Epiware was a closed source project that was released under the GPL in Setember of this year. Epiware uses a desktop metaphor, and when the user logs in they see a display of summarizing the different resources available to them on the projects that they are on. Resources include Forums, Document Libraries, Tasks and Calendars. I'll get into these resources after the install later.
The Epiware website itself is a bit sparse, and there isn't even a comprehensive description of their product on the site (all too common I'm afraid). But they do have a screenshot tour and a live demo that you can use. There also are active forums and reasonable documentation.
As for the install, it was pretty straightforward with a few quirks.
Epiware is primarily a LAMP (or AMP I suppose) application, though it does require some additional binaries to be installed. To accomplish this, you download and untar Epiware on your server and then run an install script. According to the docs the install script does the following:
After installation you just point your browser at the html directory that you moved, and you get a complaint that the storage/document_area isn't writable by the web server process. Easily changed by changing the owner of document_area, but you also need to change the permissions of the outer storage directory to allow apache to get in there as well. Now reload and move on.
Setting up a project is easy. One thing to note already in this stage is that you should go ahead and turn off the adblock Firefox extension if you are using it. In testing it seemed to interfere with many of the AJAX calls that Epiware uses.
Before going any further I realized that the nice mysql install presumably created a new database and gave permissions to a new user with a default password. That is bad for security, so I had to track down the place where that username and password is referenced and change the password. The database is named (not very helpfully) project_db. The mysql login info is stored in config.inc.php and it turns out that the password was temp_password, which I changed. That change should probably be part of the install process.
I played around with Epiware a bit and noticed things weren't behaving properly (e.g. selecting to "replace" a document didn't) so I looked at the apache logs. There were a ton of warnings in there generated by Epiware (deprecations, undefined variables, undefined index, etc.). Nothing major, but may be indicate of some sloppy coding. This went for both 4.5 and the 4.6 rc. I also noticed some permission errors on the Epiware binaries which I also had to correct. 4.6rc also seemed to have problems with the calendar and with document versioning in my install, though these features both seemed to work in the demo version posted on the Epiware server. Tracking down the errors became too difficult give all of the other warnings that were being generated (thousands of them).
Ok. As for the product itself, I think it has one of the best feature sets I've encountered. Not too much and not too little. The desktop on the front page keeps things organized.
Uploading files to the library is done via some nifty AJAX upload dialogs. In fact the whole organization of the library is done using AJAX popups, menus and drag and drop. It makes the focus on document management really easy. Though this does take some getting used to since most people aren't expecting a plain text link to change to a popup menu when the click on it.
The focus here may be on document management, but what turns it into a viable project management tool are the quite capable calendar, tasks and notifications. Tasks can be assigned to individuals, events can be scheduled on the calendar and notifications can be sent out via email to team members in a variety of ways -- tracking changes to files, upon forum postings (so they can be used for team emailing), and via tasks or calendar events.
Here is an updated desktop with some of those changes in place.
The Epiware website itself is a bit sparse, and there isn't even a comprehensive description of their product on the site (all too common I'm afraid). But they do have a screenshot tour and a live demo that you can use. There also are active forums and reasonable documentation.
As for the install, it was pretty straightforward with a few quirks.
Epiware is primarily a LAMP (or AMP I suppose) application, though it does require some additional binaries to be installed. To accomplish this, you download and untar Epiware on your server and then run an install script. According to the docs the install script does the following:
- Create a dir called /storage/document_area
- Copies binaries to /storage/binaries
- Copies share/antiword to /usr/share/antiword
After installation you just point your browser at the html directory that you moved, and you get a complaint that the storage/document_area isn't writable by the web server process. Easily changed by changing the owner of document_area, but you also need to change the permissions of the outer storage directory to allow apache to get in there as well. Now reload and move on.
Setting up a project is easy. One thing to note already in this stage is that you should go ahead and turn off the adblock Firefox extension if you are using it. In testing it seemed to interfere with many of the AJAX calls that Epiware uses.
Before going any further I realized that the nice mysql install presumably created a new database and gave permissions to a new user with a default password. That is bad for security, so I had to track down the place where that username and password is referenced and change the password. The database is named (not very helpfully) project_db. The mysql login info is stored in config.inc.php and it turns out that the password was temp_password, which I changed. That change should probably be part of the install process.
I played around with Epiware a bit and noticed things weren't behaving properly (e.g. selecting to "replace" a document didn't) so I looked at the apache logs. There were a ton of warnings in there generated by Epiware (deprecations, undefined variables, undefined index, etc.). Nothing major, but may be indicate of some sloppy coding. This went for both 4.5 and the 4.6 rc. I also noticed some permission errors on the Epiware binaries which I also had to correct. 4.6rc also seemed to have problems with the calendar and with document versioning in my install, though these features both seemed to work in the demo version posted on the Epiware server. Tracking down the errors became too difficult give all of the other warnings that were being generated (thousands of them).
Ok. As for the product itself, I think it has one of the best feature sets I've encountered. Not too much and not too little. The desktop on the front page keeps things organized.
You can find all of the basic features right from here - Calendar, Tasks, Forums, Files, etc.
From what I can tell, version 4.6 made a Wiki available as well. This may have been in version 4.5, but it wasn't obvious. You can edit the "about" page for the site using a WYSIWYG wiki editor. The documentation is a bit sparse, but the basic editing is easy.
From what I can tell, version 4.6 made a Wiki available as well. This may have been in version 4.5, but it wasn't obvious. You can edit the "about" page for the site using a WYSIWYG wiki editor. The documentation is a bit sparse, but the basic editing is easy.
Uploading files to the library is done via some nifty AJAX upload dialogs. In fact the whole organization of the library is done using AJAX popups, menus and drag and drop. It makes the focus on document management really easy. Though this does take some getting used to since most people aren't expecting a plain text link to change to a popup menu when the click on it.
The focus here may be on document management, but what turns it into a viable project management tool are the quite capable calendar, tasks and notifications. Tasks can be assigned to individuals, events can be scheduled on the calendar and notifications can be sent out via email to team members in a variety of ways -- tracking changes to files, upon forum postings (so they can be used for team emailing), and via tasks or calendar events.
Here is an updated desktop with some of those changes in place.
What I liked about Epiware was the relative simplicity of project management. In that way it was perhaps most comparable to Activecollab, the Basecamp clone. Epiware has document versioning going for it, which Activecollab does not have. This is critical project management feature in my opinion. It also has a Wiki, though I understand that this is coming to Activecollab via modules in the future. But I like the fact that there are no "modules" here, that vastly simplifies administration. I don't like having to find the right set of compatible modules and making sure they're all up to date. I like the tasks and the calendaring here as well. Both Activecollab and Epiware have good messaging components.
The document management portion of Epiware may also be comparable to something like Alfresco, but with a vastly simpler interface. The fact is that Epiware doesn't explicitly specify workflow, like Alfresco does. While that limits its utility in a publishing context, it makes it an easier to use project management tool.
There are some rough edges on the installation, use and interface (and all of those warnings mentioned earlier), but the feature set and overall design of Epiware are quite good. I'm seriously considering using it for project management.
The document management portion of Epiware may also be comparable to something like Alfresco, but with a vastly simpler interface. The fact is that Epiware doesn't explicitly specify workflow, like Alfresco does. While that limits its utility in a publishing context, it makes it an easier to use project management tool.
There are some rough edges on the installation, use and interface (and all of those warnings mentioned earlier), but the feature set and overall design of Epiware are quite good. I'm seriously considering using it for project management.