Project Auriga is a "stuff tracking" tool, stuff being projects, tasks, hours, schedules, estimates, mileage, issues, software licenses, checklists, and anything else a customer wants to add in a custom module.
A side benefit of Auriga is that it synchronizes data between itself, SugarCRM, and Ledger SMB providing the glue that makes it a core piece of a componentized ERP system.
A final benefit of Auriga is to showcase our AJAX development skills and provide a core product to differentiate Freelock as a business.
About Project Auriga
So why do we need another project management tool when there are dozens out there already? What makes Project Auriga necessary?
While we certainly haven't tried everything out there, we haven't seen anything that quite fits the way we think about the problem. As a small service business, we have some challenges that hardly seem unique:
- Lots of customers, and lots of small individual projects
- Many projects that follow a specific process, with the same tasks repeated over and over
- Some larger projects that span weeks and sometimes months
- A need to instantly see when we have time available to do a project
- A need to easily schedule new work, and not get overbooked
- A need to accurately track hours spent on particular tasks
- The ability to quickly report where our hours were spent
As a dedicated open source business, we also wanted to better integrate some core business systems: our sales management system (SugarCRM) and our billing system (LedgerSMB). We hated having to enter account information multiple times. We're creating a powerful ERP system, capable of managing all aspects of a business, but doing it with a Unix architecture: small pieces loosely joined.
Finally, because we're web programmers and really like using AJAX interfaces, that's what we use to do the job. Drag-and-drop scheduling, rich interfaces, the opportunity to show our clients what we're capable of creating.
So how was it created?
Project Auriga is primarily written in PHP. We are currently developing for our environment only so if you'd like to hire us to make it run in yours, we'd be happy to help. If you'd like to contribute code to make it work, that's welcome too.
Here's what we have it working under, and some of the software libraries we've used in its development:
- Linux server, Mandriva and Ubuntu (shouldn't matter which distribution)
- Apache 2
- MySQL 5.0+
- PHP 5.1+ (mod_php)
- PEAR-DB, PEAR-HTML_QuickForm (may drop the QuickForm stuff--easier to do in Smarty)
- Smarty
- Dojo Toolkit 1.0+