We have all heard of Openoffice, as a replacement for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint but the replacements for other tools that people are really comfortable with has been a little more difficult – and in this I am mainly talking about MS Project. MS Project is a very costly product, particularly for the small business or independent contractor, costing upwards of £500 for the most basic version. If you do not have it, then it really impacts you when that client sends you a project plan to follow, or if you needed to create a project plan for a particular customer, so you used to have to just buy it. You could of course use the various software as a service free/low cost systems out there like Basecamp and a number of others and hope that no-one wanted to have all that information available in the MS Project file format.

Now though, there is an open-source piece of software available that offers the 80% features that people use out of MS Project including the ability to open the MS Project file format – this is Serena Software’s Openproj. It is pretty basic and, shall we say, a bit ugly in most eyes but it does the job and there is no outlay. Openproj has advanced significantly since the version 0.90 that I started using to what is now version 1.4. It has become more stable, and slightly prettier. It also has one other major advantage – it works on multiple platforms, so if you are not a Windows fiend then you can actually fire it up on Linux/Unix and on Apple systems. One weakness it has is in the filesaving capability as it saves in the MS Project 2003 XML format, which needs to be imported into Microsoft’s product rather than simply opened but that is relatively simple to do. It does also have its own file format for those who do not need to keep files always in a Microsoft compatible format.

I am sure this is going to continue to develop, and the recent purchase of the Projity company by Serena Software, shows that the product has some legs.