11. Management

Esther Schindler wrote a thought-provoking column on CIO.com last week, Business Social Networking Geography: Does It Matter Where My Contacts Are?

Although the Internet is global, and you may do business with people anywhere in the world, most people tend to look for people-networks close to home. Or do they? Should they?

We're hiring programmers, over at Freelock. I've been going through lots code samples to try to identify how experienced and competent a particular developer is. I also do this on a regular basis to evaluate how solid a particular open source project is.

I've seen a lot of code in various languages. As a technical writer, I used to write documentation for programmers teaching them how to use a particular interface or system. I've been involved with traditional software development projects at large software companies and startups.

I met Bruce Henry at an MIT Enterprise Forum event last night. Turns out we're both working on software for project management. Theirs is Liquid Planner, ours is Project Auriga.

I'm a bit skeptical about their statistical approach to project scheduling... I definitely agree with giving estimates in ranges, but how is your approach that different? Aren't you depending on arbitrary guesses by the project manager users, to come up with those ranges and confidence values?

New Open Source ERP vendor in Belgium. Interview with the founder here: Open source start-up updates its ERP suite for SMBs

Putting together a proposal for a potential client, we've unearthed a couple of cool Electronic Medical Record (EMR) applications. First, the original OpenEMR, apparently started with PostNuke and customized to provide extensive capabilities for managing an office.

Now there's also Clear Health. Clear Health has the benefit of a former OpenEMR developer's experience, and the interface has been greatly cleaned up and enhanced with AJAX to make it clean, usable, and fast.

Lots of people have been looking for a good timesheet program. Here's one I just stumbled upon. Timesheet.php Homepage. It's available on Sourceforge, under the GPL.

It also has some integration with SugarCRM.

Stumbled across this project management system recently, an open source web-based system called Trac. Developed by Edgewall Software, Trac is a Wiki-based system complete with task management, bug tracking, and milestone tracking. Might be a great fit for collaborative software development.

Just found a site that provides a feature comparison for several dozen content management systems of various types, both proprietary and open source. Search for the features you need, and this will show what's available. Not found on this list are some wiki engines, ERP systems, CRM systems, or document management--but these are some of the features you can select from the list to narrow down on a content management system. The CMS Matrix - Content Management Comparison Tool.

At Freelock Computing, several of our clients are looking for decent project management tools. We think we're going to roll our own solution, but have found a few new options.

First of all, a cross-platform desktop project management tool: GanttPV - Open Source Software for Project Management. Many of the desktop-oriented tools are rapidly gaining features comparable to MS Project, mainly in terms of resource scheduling.

An open source time tracking program called Jobby has just been released. What's cool about this is that it hooks into the SQL Ledger financial database. It also connects to dotProject.

Right now, it reads customers, vendors, and services directly from SQL Ledger. In its next phase, it will transfer hours directly into SQL Ledger invoices!