dotProject Web Hosting

dotProject Web Hosting

dotProject is an open source project management tool and it is completely supported by a volunteer group and its users. This web based project management application is designed to provide project layout and control functions. This project is managed, developed and maintained by the volunteer group and users. dotProject is essentially web-based, multi-user, multi-language enabled free software. The software is completely free to download and the software related support is generally just a few clicks away; either through the forums or the online documentation. dotProject offers support for Gantt charts but as of version 2.0 the task dependencies feature is not complete.

dotProject is programmed in PHP, and utilizes MySQL for a backend database (although other databases such as Postgres could also be used). The recommended server platform includes:

• Apache 1.3.27
• PHP 4.2+
• MySQL
• Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD. (However, additional operating systems such as Windows, Mac are also supported).

Before running dotProject; it is important to understand what exactly is project management all about. Project Management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets for an organization, whilst optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, equipment, space etc). It is about the structuring of a series of tasks and the schedule associated with those tasks, to achieve an outcome. The nature of tasks, schedules and its related functions like project planning, contract negotiation, risk management, cost management etc primarily depends on the nature of the project to be managed. The goal of dotProject is to provide the essential tools to the project manager to smoothly manage tasks, schedules, communication and sharing. The software can be used for a wide range of applications and environments like small offices, single people trying to manage their own workload, companies, government departments, not for profit organizations, schools and so on. The most vital feature of dotProject is that it can be easily use for managing a defined workload, with a defined resource base who are co-operating to deliver a project. dotProject was developed as a state of the art Project Management tool in the year 2000 by dotmarketing.org. The core aim of the project is to fulfill the following requirements:

• Clean, simple and consistent user interface
• Project Management functionality – not another CMS, groupware environment or all things to all people collaboration tool, but a project management environment.
• Open source / open access / free usage

Its key features include:

• User Management
• Email based trouble Ticket System, (Integrated voxel.net’s ticketsmith)
• Client/Company Management
• Project listings
• Hierarchical Task List
• File Repository
• Contact List
• Calendar
• Discussion Forum
• Resource Based Permissions

System Prerequisites:
The web server implementations include:

• LAMP: Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP
• WAMP: Windows+Apache+MySQL+PHP
• WIMP: Windows+IIS+MySQL+PHP
• Apache2 is only recommended at release 2.0.49 or later combined with PHP4.3.5 or later.
• PHP version 4.1.x or higher is required. PHP versions earlier than 4.0.x are not supported.
• PHP needs to have the GD library installed to allow the Gantt charts to work.
• XML support needs to be enabled. Missing XML support will show as missing utf8_encode and utf8_decode functions.
• Register_Globals MUST be turned off.
• PHP 5 support will be worked in from release 2.1.0 – rc1 and onwards.
• MySQL version 3.23.51 or higher is recommended.
• MySQL Configuration must allow the generation of temporary tables.
• The Gantt charts used in dotProject use jpGraph. This requires that certain TrueType fonts are present on the system.
• On Linux systems, dotProject v1.0.2 uses sendmail to handle outgoing mail. On Windows it is SMTP. dotProject version now 2.x supports both sendmail or SMTP on all platforms and sendmail is no longer mandatory.

Disclaimer : We are not affiliated with the dotProject at http://www.dotproject.net/ and have offered this review from the information presented on the site. If you find any information which is not correctly represented in our review of dotproject, please let us know and we would be glad to update it