Evaluated a pretty cool project management tool called wrike.
The technical support seems pretty good. Someone replied to questions I had within a reasonable amount of time (a day).
But I just couldn’t get a grip on it.
After a fair bit of poking around (that’s about 10 minutes) I couldn’t figure out how to either adjust the timelines chart, or to export the timelines chart as an image or something I could put into another document.
For me, the interface was going to require a serious time commitment to learn, and I would have to take it on faith that my investment would have the ROI I need (i.e., exportable charts).
So I deleted my account.
I’m going to keep an eye on it though.
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If you want to try something that works the way you do, try ActionThis – see http://www.actionthis.com. Its focus is on task management for teams, but there’s an Outlook client as well, so you can use Outlook to create and manage your ActionThis tasks alongside your other email – you don’t have to learn anything new.
And if you use the website only, that provides an easy to use application that you should be able to use pretty quickly.
Try it – there’s a free 30 day trial all features, and there’s a free version which is more than capable.
The link in my post above isn’t working because of punctuation – try http://www.actionthis.com
David,
Thank you for giving Wrike a try.
As for adjusting timeline – it’s easy you need to just drag-n-drop due-dates. It is such a pity that you could invest just 10 minutes of your time. If you had spent at least 15 minutes, I’m sure you would see more benefits in Wrike for your projects.
We’ll be glad to have you back as our customer. The next big feature release is coming in a month, so stay tuned!
By the way, the you can read more on the use of WRike timeline here http://www.wrike.com/blog/07/16/2007/Get_a_Timeline_on_the_way
Daria: Thanks for the feedback. Since I currently bill by the hour as a consultant, anything other than MS* tools has to be either brutally simple, or the client has to be paying for it. What I liked about Basecamp is that I got value from it immediately. It passed my “6 second rule.” I’m curious, do you have any instrumentation in place for measuring conversions? Are you running any split testing on your interfaces?
Tim: My client does tasking in Excel, which is what I will be doing remainder of the current project. My time budget for evaluating new tools is spent for the month, but I will definitely take a look at your tools in a few weeks.
For both of you and anyone else, I have no problem working in heterogeneous environments, and will purchase “competing” packages if both have capabilities I need. A big factor in any purchase of course is being able to post-process my data. I typically use sed, cut, paste and unique in bash script.
Also try http://www.5pmweb.com. Their timeline seams to be a bit nicer and it looks like they are developing it on. Don’t know about image export, but you can contact them and see if this is something they have in the plans.
Update:
I’m using freemind to structure the work, and ganttproject for timelining. Neither of these scale particularly well, but they solved my immediate problem at the time.