Comindwork Piles on Project Management Features
February 18th, 2008 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 2 Comments
There are a lot of choices in the online project management space these days. Many of them are influenced by the well-known Basecamp philosophy of carefully keeping the feature set to a minimum in order to focus effort and ease learning. Not so with Comindwork, a product of Kiev-based NewtonIdeas. If you’re looking for an all-in-one management tool for distributed projects, you may want to poke around in their product.
Comindwork includes bits of functionality that you might ordinarily find spread across multiple sites and services. As with just about any other project management software, it will track projects, tasks, team members, and deadlines, as well as the connections between them. But in addition, it includes time-tracking, issue-tracking, internal blogs, and svn-versioned file storage. You probably won’t spend your entire working day here, but certainly it covers a large variety of management and collaborative tasks.
As you might expect from trying to cram so much into a single product, the user interface for Comindwork is rather complex (some would even say “cluttered”). After selecting a project to work with, you’ll find a tabbed user interface broken into Overview, Team, Blog, Wiki, Milestones, Cases, Time and Files. Most of these pages have their own sub-tabs, and a third set of tabs covers History, Search, Reports, and Settings. To combat the complexity, you can get all-in-one views of your project under either Overview or History, and there are comprehensive RSS feeds (as well as targeted email notifications). Search and pervasive tagging make it easier to find information, but Comindwork still feels like there are a lot of “buckets” to put things into, and it’s possible to get lost in the UI unless you spend a lot of time using it.
Other nice features here include time zone awareness, good use of color to indicate urgency, two-click creation of new cases, informative calendars, and a reasonably-nuanced permissions system. You can get a better feel for what’s included by working through the tour on their web site, or clicking through from the tour to a live demo login. Comindwork is available in a free package (limited to 5 projects and 5 users) or several levels of paid plans starting at $29 per month.
2 Comments Post your own comment
Marcin Grodzicki says: February 19th, 2008 12:05am
It’s very similar to ActiveCollab, maybe with a bit better design. They’re both quite complicated though. If you manage a distributed software project you do have a need for something more functional than ultra-light Basecamp, but those things (AC, and this one) are cluttered with features and much less functional because of that. I think it’s because they’re made by programmers for programmes with no ergonomy and true design in mind. There’s still a lot to do in ergonomy in PM SaaS products.
Jeremiah Staes says: February 19th, 2008 3:21pm
Having deployed - I don’t know - seven or eight project management systems with external clients - I have learned that the complex ones always fail and everyone returns to using email.
The one exception is Basecamp - which is what I continue to use today. My clients love it because it’s simple and learning something new for a contractor, in reality, is just not going to happen. As much as they want project management, they don’t care enough to learn a system, especially one for a vendor of theirs…. and, it works well even for my non-web savvy clients.
Basecamp has some shortcomings - I wish there were a basic meeting calendar in there, I have to set meetings as milestones - but other than that, it’s the only solution clients will actually use, and for us, it keeps things out of email which is the goal as email gets lost, people talk about different projects or parts of projects in emails with the same subject line, etc.
Taking a gander at Comindwork, it’s just too complicated for working with people externally and how most web workers are. Now, as a corporate-implemented internal solution where there is time for training, etc. and clients don’t have to deal with it, it might work. But not for the web worker at all.