3
votes

Looking for some advice here, as my search has turned up to be pretty fruitless.

My group (9 people - SAs, programmers, and two network guys) is looking for some sort of web tool to... ahem... "facilitate increased collaboration" (we didn't use a buzzword generator, I swear). At the moment, we have an unified ticketing system that's braindead, but is here to stay for political/logistical reasons. We've got 2 wikis ("old" and "new"), neither of which fulfill our needs, and are therefore not used very often. We're looking for a free (as in both cost and open source) web-based tool.

Management side: Wants to be able to track project status, who's doing what, whether deadlines are being met, etc. Doesn't want full-fledged "project management" app, just something where we can update "yeah this was done" or "waiting for Bob to configure the widgets". TeamBox (www.teambox.com) was suggested, but it seems almost too gimmicky, and doesn't meet any of the other requirements:

Non-management side: - flexible, powerful wiki for all documentation (i.e. includes good tables, easy markup, syntax highlighting, etc.) - good full text search of everything (i.e. type in a hostname and get every instance anyone ever uttered that name) - task lists or ToDo lists, hopefully about to be grouped into a number of "projects" - file uploads - RSS or Atom feeds, email alerts of updates

We're open to doing some customizations (adding some features, notification/feeds, searching, SVN integration, etc.) but need something F/OSS (both free as in no cost, and Free as in an OSI-approved license) that will run under Apache.

My conundrum is that most of the choices I've found so far fall into one of these categories:

  1. project management/task tracking with poor wiki/documentation/knowledge base support
  2. wiki with no task tracking support
  3. ticketing system with everything else bolted on (we already have one that we're stuck with)
  4. code-centric application (we do little "development", mostly SA work)

Any suggestions?

Or, lacking that, any comments on which software would be easiest to add the lacking features to (hopefully ending up with something that actually looks good and works well)?

4 Answers 4

1
vote

I use CoMindWork.com. It has ticket tracking, blog, wiki, calendar, milestones, to-dos... all sorts of things. It even does Gantt charts! Take that, BaseCamp!! =) It's hosted though, so it might not be what you're looking for. The wiki is a little week as far as formatting and sitemap is concerned.

I like the looks of the wiki software Confluence, but don't think ticket tracking is built in. Then we're back to the code-centric part that means you'll have to do some custom hacking or contract someone to do it for you.

You might want to have a look at this PM-Sherpa article titled "45 BaseCamp alternatives" for some inspiration.

4
  • Once again... thanks, but I have no budget for this, and also need source under an OSI-approved license. Apr 27, 2010 at 21:46
  • Confluence has a sister JIRA, which does ticket tracking. Apr 27, 2010 at 21:47
  • @Jason You can get a 10 user license for $10! Doesn't make up for the lack of an OSI approved license though.
    – Wesley
    Apr 27, 2010 at 22:40
  • Something open source is a requirement, as whatever we're using, we'll have to modify to some extent (and do this legally, and preferably distribute the patches). JIRA seems a bit heavy-weight, at least with the requirement of Tomcat, etc. Apr 28, 2010 at 0:54
1
vote

While being still quite "code-centric", Redmine should meet your needs quite well.

2
  • Thanks. That's currently at the top of my evaluation list, I just need to play around with the demo a bit more. Apr 28, 2010 at 17:47
  • An easy way to test it is using BitNami self-contained installers and virtual appliances bitnami.org/stack/redmine Jun 26, 2010 at 7:03
0
votes

We've been using Assembla for the past year or so and love it. You can set up a space for each project and manage the tickets/wiki per project.

1
  • Thanks for the suggestion, but once again, I'm looking for something that's free (no cost) and Free (open source/Free as in Freedom). Apr 27, 2010 at 21:45
0
votes

Have you tried TRAC? We use it for our development process but also generally for documentation. I like the way tickets and sourcecode can be referenced in wiki pages and vice versa.

1
  • we looked into it, but as we're stuck with an in-house ticketing system, and have little source code, it was decided to be too development-oriented. Apr 28, 2010 at 17:46

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