Project-Open -- Outside The Lines

Open Source is a force to be reckoned with in today's enterprise software market. Almost every type of enterprise application, from business intelligence to sales-force automation, now includes at least one open-source option; some of them, such as the popular SugarCRM platform, are quickly gaining ground against established, closed-source competitors.

Another promising open-source enterprise application, Project-Open, is just starting what its creator hopes will be an equally successful journey into the IT mainstream. It has a long way to go: Although this project-management tool has won respect and recognition within the Free Software community, it remains almost completely unknown everyplace else. In addition, Project-Open faces one challenge that products such as SugarCRM do not: In a market where most enterprise applications gravitate towards the familiar three-letter product descriptions, it is a hybrid tool that does not fit easily into any of the usual categories.Frank Bergmannn, Project-Open's creator and chief developer, describes it as an integrated project management system. Specifically, he said, it offers planning, tracking, online collaboration and control of a company's business projects; in addition, it supports the management of provider relationships and accounts receivable/payable activity. Currently, Bergmannn stated, the software is better suited for mid-market firms than large enterprises; it can handle up to 20,000 projects, 200 employees, 2,000 freelancers and 2,000 customers.

Although Project-Open includes some CRM functionality, Bergmannn says it is not just a CRM system. Instead, Bergmannn prefers to describe it as a "Project-ERP" system -- that is, software designed to manage projects at the organizational level.

"I admit that this is a bit difficult to understand and even more difficult to explain: We are a tiny little 'SAP' for consulting companies. It's a completely new product category," Bergmannn said.

"ERP systems have a very, very different dynamic than other products. You need to understand how the entire organization works. You need a lot of experience and/or an education in business administration to understand the issues."The current release of Project-Open is available in Linux and Windows versions: "We used to work [exclusively] on Linux, but most customers want a Windows installer to try the software," said Bergmannn. The system, which also incorporates an open-source PostgreSQL database, does not place any license-related restrictions on the number of users, projects, or other performance criteria.

Bergmannn said he started Project-Open because his girlfriend needed a project management system to use for her own job. He used OpenACS (the Open Architecture Community System, an open app-development framework) for his software-development work, adhering to an open design so that other developers could extend Project-Open without having to delve too deeply into the product's architecture.Most commercial project management systems are designed for large enterprises. It's an extremely fragmented yet highly competitive enterprise market: Today, about 300 companies pitch competing software and services to a very small, and very well-heeled, enterprise-market niche that is accustomed to paying a fortune for closed-source management-systems software.

These project-management software vendors mostly ignore the small- and medium-business (SMB) market; as a rule, they consider the cost and inconvenience of marketing to firms with fewer than 50 employees to be more trouble than it is worth. Project-Open, however, was designed from the beginning to fill this "large niche" of smaller businesses; many of these firms could benefit from a project management system, but they cannot justify the expense of licensing a commercial application designed for a much larger company.

Project-Open is a good match for these firms: Although it isn't as powerful and offers fewer features than more expensive products, it still offers enough functionality to meet the needs of smaller firms.

Besides the expense of using a commercial project-management system, Bergmannn says these systems typically do not handle security the way they should. Most enterprise project-management solutions, he said, use an outdated perimeter-security model that assumes users "outside" the company pose a threat, while those "inside" the company do not. As a result, Bergmannn stated, these products are ill-suited for the community-development approach that Project-Open embraces.That embrace, of course, still presented Bergmannn with a security challenge: He and the other Project-Open developers must balance the ability to allow outside participants, including paid contractors and unpaid contributors, to access the system without compromising the application's (or the company's) security.

To address this challenge, Project-Open uses a collaborative model that defines projects as "rooms" where employees, providers and customers can work together. This is not a unique approach, of course; many project management systems use the concept of "e-rooms" for collaborative projects. But Project-Open does add its own twist to the model, integrating its own virtual rooms with the system's business-management functionality, such as its invoicing and financial control features.

"Imagine that you hire 3 or 4 employees working for you full-time, and a bunch of freelancers," Bergmannn said. "[Project-Open] allows you to check your account balance at the end of the month and allows you to check which projects made money. But it also allows you to send a newsletter to your customers and a tender to your freelancers."Bergmannn must also keep up the pace with improvements, bug-fixes, and performance enhancements for Project-Open. Currently, the software cannot support organizations that work as multiple, financially independent departments, and the system's performance can bog down when it approaches its maximum supported number of projects, users, or management relationships.

In addition, Project-Open's scheduling component is not as robust as it should be -- although, to help rectify this, the Project-Open team recently released an experimental integration with GanttProject (another open-source project planning system, but which uses Java and Gantt charts) that combines both products' finance, online collaboration, and scheduling features.

Future versions of Project-Open, according to Bergmannn, will incorporate a component for travel-cost logging, improved integration with GanttProject, and an improved user interface which will "borrow" inspiration from SugarCRM.Project-Open clearly has the potential to be a powerful business-management tool, yet it also risks overwhelming less technically-oriented users with too much complexity. Taking this into consideration, Bergmannn's team offers a series of Web seminars to teach Project-Open users how to use the software more effectively.

These types of services also illustrate Bergmannn's business model; like many other open-source projects, Project-Open generates demand for his consulting, support, and software-customization services (such as "extension modules" designed to integrate the software with specific databases). Bergmannn and his two employees are ready to expand the project's business operations; currently, the company is looking to form partnerships with other firms that can offer similar services to their own clients who use Project-Open.

Another major source of revenue continues to come from one of Project-Open's first markets: language-translation services. We are the leading [project management] software in the translation sector. We've got modules that our commercial competitors don't have -- for example, a quality management module or a configurable workflow," Bergmannn said. "We are going from niche to niche. [Our] next market is small and medium consulting companies. Then we might focus on advertising agencies or engineering companies."