In the crowded space of open source collaboration solutions, or web based project management software there is a new (ish) comer. It's Collabtive.

The product is still "beta" judging by it's current version number (0.6.2) and the project has been running for about 3 years now. Collabtive position themselves as a Basecamp alternative, you can import your basecamp set-up and it offers similar functionality.

Gantt charts are good communication tools towards the project team and toward management and stakeholders. So much that senior management sometimes wrongly associate project planning and gantt chart. What I often do to communicate the project timeline and sequence to senior management and/or customers is a "one page" powerpoint showing a summarised gantt chart.

I am a Drupal fan. Drupal is an open source CMS system. I have been using it for years, probably since version 3 and now using version 6, including for this site.

I have been playing with Xmind recently to produce a mindmap version of my CV.Here is the result.

Tell me what you think about the format.

I have been looking for a WBS tool for a while. I mean an open source/free tool to create by WBS. Of course there is Visio which is installed on my laptop but this is not the best possible tool as I feel it does not allow easy changes to the structure.

I quickly turned my attention to mind mapping software as they indeed based on a hierarchical data model. The visual part of mind maps are however your typical WBS representation.

As part of my current assignment I have to manage a number of tests activities involving several testers in several locations, testing several physical environments. To add to the complexity each environment goes through 3 distincts tests phases and we are delivering several sub-systems – each of them with specific tests and testers assigned.

Due to the complexity it rapidly turned out that a simple excel spreadsheet to manage the list of issues arising during testing was not going to be enough. The major issue was to manage concurrent updates to a single spreadsheet.