Overview of the major open source project management tools

Jan Stedehouder wrote a brief overview of four open source project management tools: GanttProject and Planner, KPlato and TaskJuggler

GanttProject video tutorial

Andrew Churches from New Zealand has composed a nice video showing a simple scenario of using GanttProject. It covers the very basic things and might be helpful for those who don't know how to start. Thank you, Andrew!


Watch the video

GanttProject 2.0.5 was released on October, 4

GanttProject 2.0.5 is a maintenance release focused on adding custom fields of tasks and resources to the available export formats.

GanttProject 2.0.5 Release Notes

GanttProject 2.0.5: Release Candidate

The Release Candidate build of GanttProject 2.0.5 is available for downloading
The complete release notes are here. More detailed descriptions of bugfixes and new features are in this blog under the label GP 2.0.5

Bugfixes, exporting functions and interface translations

GanttProject 2.0.5 news:

• Custom fields are supported in Samara HTML export theme.
  
• Resource table now saves the state of shown columns in a project file
• Annoying problem of incorrect rendering of task completion bar is fixed
• New Slovenian translation and updated Japanese translation

We are very close to the release of GanttProject 2.0.5. Hopefully the release candidate build will be ready in a few days.

OpenProj

OpenProj is a project scheduling/management tool similar to GanttProject. It is also open-source and is written in Java. There is a gantt chart, there is a network chart, there are a few resource-related charts. It is developed by Projity, which is probably better known by their online service Project-on-Demand.

My personal feeling after playing with OpenProj a little is that the application is quite raw and unstable so far. There are obvious annoying bugs and quite a lot of usability problems. Goog luck for them, though! If they manage to overcome the problems, the community will be given one more nice project management application.

A few more improvements in exporting and printing

GanttProject 2.0.5 news:

CSV export now understands custom fields and keeps correct order of tasks. Memory consumption of Print Preview has been decreased approximately twice. It is still possible that big projects will not fit into available memory if printed with big zoom level, but in this case an error message will be shown.