Collabtive: an open source collaboration software

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.

It is open source, so free, and you can install it on your own server (you'll need Apache/PHP/MySQL), alternatively Collabtive offer paid hosting. A great idea to support the project.

I have played a bit with it, here is my opinion.

Installation and Look

The installation is straight forward and could not be simpler. You have to create a blank database and Collabtive does the rest. The look and feel of the product is very advanced and polished, a lot of Ajax is being used and this gives the product the 'web 2.0' look. Thumbs up for this.

Features, Data model

Collabtive manages multiple Projects.

For each Project you can create Milestones and Task Lists. Task Lists can be linked to a Milestone, but not necessarily. The granularity ends with Tasks which are assigned to a User with a particular due date. (A Task is part of a Task List).

The tool enable Users track time spent on tasks. However there is no "forecast" or "planned" spent, so the cost tracking focused project manager will be frustrated by this limitation.
Timesheet can be exported to Excel.

Users are granted Roles with customisable permissions. For example if you can give your clients access to the system but with a restricted view and access to the system.
Collabtive also manages your files and messages (instant messages as well but I haven't tried it). There is a tagging system for files and messages.
Lastly there is an email notification systems that will help you bringing back users to the site when events occur.

Conclusion
I like Collabtive. It is simple and the interface does not get on the way of doing things, its feature list is big enough to be a good solution for a lot of users.

There are however a few bugs, for example, when you click on a Task List from the Milestone screen you end up on a blank screen, forcing you to go to the task Task List screen instead.

Also it would be nice to be able to identify which are the tasks that are not aligned to a Milestone, if a task overrun it's due date then the task is marked as red but not the milestone, I haven't seen evidence of this.

Another improvement could be about the data stored with projects, milestones, task lists and tasks: it's pretty limited to a text area and due date. For project there is a "budget" field. Maybe that could be extended.

You can try it on their demo site.