ProjectManager.com

Pros: ProjectManager.com or PM.com as we call it is very easy to use, we were able to get up and running in a very short amount of time. We have approximately 300 projects that we are managing and about 70 resources. Before PM.com we managed our projects in one system our resources in another system and our reporting from yet another system. We have been able to consolidate systems and are able to more efficiently track our projects, backlog, risks and issues. The Workload board showing the resources availability allows us to see who is available at a glance. PM.com is opened on my computer every day all day, I could NOT do my job without it. The support team and the product team are great to work with, they have a place to put in suggestions for new features and I am happy to say they have added several of my suggestions. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a new system to handle their Portfolio and Project Management offices.

Cons: There are a few features that do not work as well as I would like but I am hoping they will be updated in the near future. One area is the linking of tasks and easily being able to see the effects on the plan. MS Project does a great job of highlighting the changes. Some of the reports could use some additional filters but they have been adding to that. Overall the Pros far outweigh any of the Cons.

Comments: We liked it better than a very simple time keeping app that we were using. It does allow for more detailed project management. you can't expect it to do all of what MS Project does - it is not at that level. But it helps for teams and for predictable project management and time keeping.

Pros: I like the ability to create a fairly detailed project plan including budget and dates that are nicely mapped out in a Gantt chart. It works great for straightforward projects with a succinct task list and allows for the team to track their time to see a report on the budget for the project and the financial aspect of completing the project. I like the updated interface as well - it took a little bit to get used to, but didn't take too long.

Cons: I find the reporting to be a bit challenging. I would like to see reports that are a bit more flexible and can filter in and out certain criteria. This product isn't great to manage really long projects or challenging projects with lots of iterations. If you have a project that is iterative in nature and will develop as you move along, this set up makes it time-consuming to maintain.

Comments: There are issues with linking tasks. We have been working with customer service on this issue for years and can't get resolution. The linked tasks will update if you extend the schedule but will not always update when you shorten the schedule. This is a major issue that needs to be fixed. When we have schedules with more than 100 tasks it takes hours to fix the schedule!

Pros: Easy to use and accessible anywhere on-line. Can share a lot of detailed project information to others quickly.

Cons: Saved changes are slow to update. File size limits when uploading documents. Printing is cumbersome to format.

Comments: ProjectManager.com is a very well done and smoothly working Online/SaaS solution for project management. The product promises to have all the features of Microsoft Project and it delivers on that. One of the big draw cards for us was the online Gantt chart and having tried a variety of other solutions in the past, PM.com's implementation sticks out regarding performance and ease of use. It's very robust and also allows the import of existing data from Office. Another really useful feature is the built-in reporting and in particular when dealing with larger teams, the ability to do time sheets and workload inspection/management. The latter gives you a quite comprehensive overview of what's going on in your team and if there is any availability for assigning work to members of the team. The different pricing plan options cater really well for different feature requirements and team sizes and we feel we're getting very good value out of using the service - in particular when comparing it against the "clumsiness" of using isolated desktop products as an alternative and having to share MS Project documents around.

Comments: Detailed project planning and studio capacity management

Pros: You can manage a project timeline, allocate people to tasks and this builds up a studio schedule which you can use to check if people's time are well utilised. The reporting tool also makes it possible to forecast into the future to see what capacity the studio is running at. It is great that it is cloud based. You can set the working days of a person and the number of hours each person works, which helps accurately plan capacity. Linking of tasks is also a helpful feature to easily update project timings.

Cons: There are a couple of features I'd like to see incorporated, such as a different colour in the workload view for potential projects, and on the calendar RSS feed the project name needs to be included as well as the task name, otherwise all your tasks can come across with the same name (i.e. design, design, design,). I would also like to see the styling improved when you save a project plans to PDF - as they are currently very difficult to read in this format and it makes it hard to share them with clients.