I work in a small team. A former PM for some reason started using an Excel spreadsheet for ticket tracking (we use ticket rather than issue or task). The nightmare of constantly emailing new versions of the spreadsheet and trying to keep it current and merging in others' changes... ugh. But we recently converted that method to a Google Docs spreadsheet and it seems to be working out nicely. We don't have a ton of tickets so it is pretty easily manageable.
Because of client requirements, my team uses Sharepoint. What an overcomplicated mess. For information security reasons, Gmail is blocked. So, even though we would want to use a google spreadsheet on the side for tracking tasks and issues that might not merit posting to our client's sharepoint site, we can't. To replicate this functionality, we occasionally collaboratively edit a spreadsheet on the LAN. Everybody hates Sharepoint, but they still use it because it's what they know. I think the best way to get a foot into this market would be to build an open-source replacement for Sharepoint, and build a business around deployments and consulting. Not an easy task. There are many tools out there that do one or two of the things that Sharepoint does, but few of these tools integrate with one another. Perhaps part of the reason Sharepoint sucks so hard is that it gives you all of these things out of the box. If you could build a modular system for all of this functionality, and market it successfully, there would be tons of businesses wanting to buy your services. Granted, services companies don't scale the way that product companies do, but do a handful of enterprise deployments and then retire. I envision such a system being like Wordpress with various plug-ins. Make the complexity of the software match the complexity of the problem you are trying to solve, without introducing incidental complexity.
Alfresco looks like a great product. I'm picturing a set of unix-like tool built of small components that each do one thing well. Perhaps a set of rails plugins, which probably already exist. Alfresco seems a bit monolithic. Perhaps this is just a fact of life with any CMS/Collaboration software. Alfresco has add-ons, too. I'm sure it's head and shoulders above Sharepoint in terms of deployment and usability.
While I like this, the problem is that there's no way to correlate discussions and attachments with a particular task when using a spreadsheet.
The saving grace of most issue trackers is that they usually come with comment threads, which makes trying to wade through email to figure out the context of a particular task pretty challenging.
Agreed, my number one gripe with spreadsheets as development trackers is that you can't have a discussion around a task.
As a product manager I might write something down and it makes perfect sense to me but not the developer. Hence there needs to be a place for a discussion.
While a spreadsheet might feel simple, I'm argue that there are other simple solutions (PivotalTracker) that get this thing "right"; even for a team of one.
For a single developer tracking their own work this may be fine, because you can keep the entire spreadsheet and the details of the issues in your head. However, this doesn't scale. I recently worked somewhere that used a couple Google Spreadsheet to track around twenty people working on around ten closely related projects. Moving to Redmine, while resisted by the manager types that didn't want to learn new software, dramatically improved our ability to get things done.
The real minimalistic, agile approach is a magnetic whiteboard with index cards.
I'm not trying to be snarky here. A whiteboard has high resolution (300+ dpi), tons of real estate (8 feet by 4 feet), a haptic interface (you can carry the cards back to your desk), and constantly broadcasts status information.
Why people would sacrifice that for some crappy 30" monitor mystifies me.
(Okay, it doesn't really mystify me. It's necessary for non-colocated teams. But with rare exceptions, that just makes electronic "agile" tools a palliative cure.)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadHm, like http://www.alfresco.com/tour ?
They appear to have a freemium pricing model. http://www.alfresco.com/products/compare
Alfresco looks like a great product. I'm picturing a set of unix-like tool built of small components that each do one thing well. Perhaps a set of rails plugins, which probably already exist. Alfresco seems a bit monolithic. Perhaps this is just a fact of life with any CMS/Collaboration software. Alfresco has add-ons, too. I'm sure it's head and shoulders above Sharepoint in terms of deployment and usability.
edit: I think Asana looks great: http://asana.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_Application_Marku...
The saving grace of most issue trackers is that they usually come with comment threads, which makes trying to wade through email to figure out the context of a particular task pretty challenging.
As a product manager I might write something down and it makes perfect sense to me but not the developer. Hence there needs to be a place for a discussion.
While a spreadsheet might feel simple, I'm argue that there are other simple solutions (PivotalTracker) that get this thing "right"; even for a team of one.
It's very easy to create a free account and just get down to brass tax. It's made by former Facebook engineers, check it out!
www.asana.com
It is intended to have no features other than task name and todo-doing-done for personal projects.
I'm not trying to be snarky here. A whiteboard has high resolution (300+ dpi), tons of real estate (8 feet by 4 feet), a haptic interface (you can carry the cards back to your desk), and constantly broadcasts status information.
Why people would sacrifice that for some crappy 30" monitor mystifies me.
(Okay, it doesn't really mystify me. It's necessary for non-colocated teams. But with rare exceptions, that just makes electronic "agile" tools a palliative cure.)