Running activeCollab

I've been tinkering with activeCollab for quite a while now, but hadn't got around to using it enough for a full review.  This past week I needed to start a new project site, and thought that would be a good time to try it out in earnest. 

For those of you who don't know activeCollab, it is a near clone of the popular project management system Basecamp.   Basecamp, made my 37 Signals (home of Ruby on Rails), has an avid following, and API for add-ons and a free trial version.  The free version lets you set up a single project with unlimited users, but requires you to have any uploaded files stored elsewhere on a server.  This really only makes sense if you have a server in the first place.  Plans go up from there to $12 per month for 3 projects and 200mb of storage all the way up to $149 per month for unlimited projects and 20gb of storage.

Basecamp's popularity is likely due to its simplicity.  It is easy to navigate around, see updated information and do what you need to do. It doesn't have every bell and whistle but what it does, it does well and does with elegance.  This is critical for small collaborative projects.  If the collaboration software is not easy to use, people will not use it and either default to email (which is a pain) or cause the group to be dysfunctional.

Basecamp is about sharing messages, files, and milestones/to dos.   The same could be said for the PHP based activeCollab.  It is simple, elegant (just a little less flash than Basecamp) and focused on a doing a few things well.  Though it has a few shortcomings (read on) it is almost as good as Basecamp for zero cost (if you have a server). Others have discussed the differences between activeCollab and Basecamp, and I'll build on that as well.

activeCollab (I tested version 0.71) is a fairly standard PHP/MySQL application.  You unzip the archive into a directory, setup a database user and database and point your browser at the install script.  There were a few hiccups in the installation process including a misconfigured directory, write permissions and a reference to a missing "php gd" extension.  None of these were hard to fix (the php gd extension was easily retrieved through yum on FC5), but it would have been helpful to have a suggested fix for each problem rather than just stating that you have the problem. 

After installation you can log into activeCollab as the administrator and get started.  It defaults to a login screen with suggested first steps including adding users, projects and clients.  That is helpful, and it does keep track of your progress, though I would have liked a little less emphasis on clients, since we're using this product internally, as I suspect others are.  The notion of clients should feel more optional.

Each user has a Dashboard that provides the information in a quick view about all of the latest information on their projects.

From there you can quickly access your tasks or projects and narrow down the amount of information you are looking at.  The "most recent" feature is pervasive and one of the things that makes activeCollab so usable.  You can jump back into a project and catch up where you left off.  

Within each project the main tabs are

• Messages
  
• Tasks
• Milestones
• Files
• Tags
• Forms
• People

In my previous experience with Basecamp, Messages seem to be the backbone of this software.  From here you can post messages like you would on a forum, assign it to milestones, and provided several other specifications, most importantly who you would like the message emailed to. While web based collaborative systems are great, there needs to be a balance of push and pull.  I find that people need reminders of activity.  They can ignore the details and find them later online or read them from their inboxes.  That is really useful.

Tasks are assigned to individual users (or groups of users) and are easily organized and prioritized. They only get a sense of time if they are associated with milestones, which can be done easily.  Milestones are time based, and can be associated with tasks or messages.  In many ways Milestones are the organizing principle of activeCollab, but they can be a little less so since activeCollab (unlike Basecamp) also provides the facility to associate Tags with all items.  Milestones can be exported as ical files, and many parts of activeCollab can be subscribed to as RSS feeds.  Files can be uploaded and placed in folders that the user defines.  There is also provisioning for versioning of files, which is incredibly useful. I'm not quite sure the function of Forms, but you can create a simple one text field form that can be displayed and the response to which will be added to another section of the site.  I suppose the utility of this is if you really did have a client who only had access to very limited parts of the site, you could use this to get information from them.

So what is missing?  The main thing that is missing from my perspective is some sort of shared writing space.  In Basecamp this is their simple one page Writeboards, though this could be a Wiki.  As you can see in my screenshots, there is indeed a Wiki tab, but this is only there because I put it there (the joys of open source).  I made a three line change in one file that put an extra tab there that simply provides a link to a totally separate Wiki (I chose pmWiki, though this will need further evaluation).  It is really just there for convenience.  It would be great to have a Wiki (or Writeboard) included, as it fills a useful space between messages and files.  There is quite a bit of discussion on the activeCollab forums about this topic, and I'm sure at some point it will be included.  The disadvantage of a separate space is of course the complexity of multiple logins, lack of notifications, and the inability to integrate with the Dashboard.  

After some time stepping through activeCollab, it came time to make a decision about what software to use for my new project.  I went through many other possible choices (thinks like egroupware), but most of them are just much too big.  I want to give the team the minimum set of useful tools to make it easy to use (and therefore increase the likelihood that it will be used).  So I was deciding between activeCollab, the recently reviewed Epiware, and Basecamp itself. 

As far as activeCollab was concerned I saw the following:

Pros

• Easy and familiar (to anyone who has used Basecamp) interface
• Does most things that I want it to
• Great centralization of information and updates
• Great messaging features out to email

Cons

• No Wiki or writeboards
• Weak calendaring (milestones only)
• Developed by a small team (mostly one person it seems - slow but steady progress)
• Some minor UI inconsistencies (e.g. what happens when you click on the little down arrow?)
  
• Still beta and probably will be for a while

Epiware had Wikis and calendaring going for it.  But it lost on familiarity of the interface (and a little on ease of use) and had a number of annoying (albeit not showstopping) bugs.  It had enough bugs (problems with timezones, a few exceptions) that, although I felt like it has a superior feature set, I worried that for this project those bugs might annoy people enough that they either wouldn't use the software or would force me to fix them myself.  Perhaps my next project I'll choose Epiware as I really like the features, but for now it lost out. 

As for Basecamp, the Writeboards were the main thing it had going for it.  The free account would force me to use my own storage space anyway, which would mean going to the next price up.  While not terribly expensive, it wasn't clear what I got for that cost.  

In the end I went with activeCollab.  As we start to use it, I'll try to update this space.