However, dP is not without its flaws; indeed, I became so frustrated that late last week I asked my lead developer Ken Woodward to send me some examples of competitive systems that did not include BaseCamp. While BaseCamp is a great system, and probably amongst the top few project management tools out there, it’s not cheap, and we have a lot of projects running simultaneously. Plus, I am a constant advocate of OSS solutions, and in this situation, where many of my staff are student developers, having a locally-owned OSS platform that can be modified by my staff as they learn their trade is very attractive.

Let me note that I always feel guilty critiquing an OSS project, especially when I myself haven’t made any significant contributions to the code. At the same time, with increasing competition in OSS solutions, one has more liberty to leave behind that which doesn’t suit one’s needs. Further, reasonable explication of the features and failures of any system is valuable to developers who are committed to building and maintaining a quality system. So here’s a quick review of dotProject with some particular attention to the broken bits. My next post will introduce the alternatives that we are considering.

Here’s a list of dP’s strengths or notable features:

• user-based and password protected
• email integrated
• distinction between projects and tasks (you’d be surprised how many “project management” tools omit this!)
• robust data at the project level, with good hierarchical layout of tasks
• project tasks may be imported into other projects, thus “templates”
• calendaring
• task dependency
• good, flexible task logging and time tracking
• decent gant charts
• written in PHP
• themes

Now, a list of complaints:

No RSS. For my unit, RSS or Atom feeds are taken for granted. If I can’t put my task list on my Google home page, I’m not happy. RSS is easy to script, however, so we could add this feature to our To Do list.

Inconsistent task/to do list. I haven’t quite figured this out, but one’s “tasks” list is different from the “to do” list that dP presents. This appears to just be a bug, as the To Do list–which is actually harder to get to–is more accurate.

Some weird PHP scripting. For instance, project categories: one can create categories for projects, like “in planning” or “in progress” or “pilot” or “complete”. The problem seems to be that dP attaches a simple numeric id to each of these category names. It attaches the same numeric id to the projects in the category. Makes sense, right? Wrong. The category ids correspond to the order in which they appear as tabs in the dP interface; if you change the order, the numeric ids of the categories change, and thus no longer match the project categories. I’ve actually found several examples of similarly breakable scripting in the system (including a stubborn “masking” of certain projects related to this) but this was the most frustrating one.

Calendar/date entry is inadequate. In order to set a task due date to, say, December 2010, you can’t type 12/01/2010, you have to open the calendar GUI, then click, click, click, click through the months until you get to December 2010.

Little data available outside of gant charts. And the gant charts fail to react intelligently to clearly “inactive” projects, instead extending them perpetually as if someone were still working on it (even though no hours were logged). But really the main complaint here is that there is no simple, easy way to access data on staff or projects. For example, I can’t click a user’s name and determine how many hours they logged in dP this week. I can’t look at all projects of a type and get an average of hours spent to completion. I can get clear, individual project data from individual projects

Not embeddable, widgetizeable. Several project management systems have scripts, or embeddable widgets, or even desktop apps that help you monitor your tasks. dP does not yet. If they only had RSS, we’d be able to get somewhere. XML RPC? That’d be cool.

Average GUI. The graphical user interface in dP is average at best. It’s not horrible; it’s not elegant. It could be adjusted with a new CSS, but my experimentation with theming in dP is that too much can go wrong, and I’ve tried several themes that actually break basic features of the system! OK, so maybe I just need to spend more time on this, but compared to theming in Drupal or WordPress, dP theming is no fun.

Small community support. Though the quality of people involved in dP is great, the number of people developing, contributing, and using the system is a lot smaller than I’d hoped for. The last date of a major upgrade or bug fix was July 2008. I really want to add some of my staff to that community, but right now may not be the best time in the history of our organization.

So, we’re looking at other options–and I’ll review some of those next time–but I recognize that in the end we may stick with dP. If we do, it will have to be with a greater commitment to participate in the dP community, because several of these complaints I’ve listed simply can’t be allowed to stand, and its true we haven’t given much back.

This Wave was embedded with the wavr plugin for WordPress. In beta testing I was able to get my wave ID from the URI, and made the wave public by adding public@a.gwave.com.

My review will be a little different from John and Ben Krutsch’s review, as I almost immediately set about wiping the Xandros Linux operating system (OS) and installed Ubuntu Linux, which I am using on several other computers.

Specs of EeePC 900

Review

The ASUS EeePC 900 is a compact, fairly light, surprisingly powerful notebook that will suit the needs of nearly any mobile dekstop computing user, providing they have good manual dexterity and eyesight.

Strengths:

• Small width and depth
• Good resolution for the size (1024 x 600)
• Sufficient USB ports (3) & SD card slot
• VGA video out
• Fairly lightweight
• Fast boot up (< 1min) and application starts
• No moving hard drive to farm
• Bright screen in normal, indoor lighting

Weaknesses:

• Average height
• Small screen requires good vision (disclaimer: my colleague John Krutsch has a visual impairment but did not complain about the readability of the screen size)
• Keyboard is a little awkward and uncomfortable for my hands
• Not as lightweight as I’d expected
• Limited storage space (I’ve set aside the 16gb 2nd memory for my storage space.
• Achromatic chassis may be boring to some
• No Bluetooth or WAN

It’s fair to say I have high expectations for laptops/notebooks. I’ve owned half-a-dozen different brands of laptops (Panasonic, Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, Texas Instruments/Acer), and so far my favorites have been Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Dell, in that order. In fact, I now own two Lenovos which I use 90% of the time—a Thinkpad T60 for my “desktop replacement” with a docking station, and a Thinkpad x60s as my writing notebook.

Because the EeePC was predicted to replace my Thinkpad x60s in my workflow I reviewed the EeePC in comparison. It’s important to keep in mind that the EeePC costs three times less than the Thinkpad x60s, and ASUS certainly didn’t intend for it to be a competitor of these higher-end laptops. I run Ubuntu 8.4 on my Thinkpad, and for the basic word processing and Web/Internet apps I used there is very little noticeable advantage to the Thinkpad in terms of speed, which is a strong mark for the EeePC.

The battery life of my charged EeePC was labeled at approximately 6 hours, though I will update this information tonight after I let it run down.

Obviously the Thinkpad has a larger screen and a full-size keyboard, and so it wins there hands down—by comparison, typing on the EeePC was painful, though the more I type with it the easier it becomes.. What really startled me upon comparison was how insignificant the weight difference was between the EeePC 900 and the Thinkpad x60s—the Thinkpad was a mere 6 oz heavier—not enough to really notice.

So while the EeePC is a compact tool of considerable computing power at an unbeatable price, it’s small size can be weighed as a disadvantage in terms of screen and keyboard usability. For my purposes, it’s not significantly lighter or more convenient than my Thinkpad x60s, and so to facilitate my writing work I will probably stick with the latter. I expect the EeePC to be very convenient, however, to keep in my office as a highly portable, on-demand notebook for toting around campus to meetings and appointments.

Applications for E-Learning

The most prominent application for learning with EeePCs comes from their low pricetag. At ~$400 USD I could imagine these being standard equipment for jr. high or high school students. If my son’s school had an established plan for integrating use of notebook computers into the daily curriculum, I would have no problem shelling out the money for one of these. Presuming that these could be used for at least 2 years, probably 3-4 if any memory expansions become available, the bang-for-the-buck potential is high.

The Xandros and the Ubuntu distributions come with Firefox for the Web, OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, and Ubuntu comes with GIMP for image editing–this open source suite alone provides users with significant opportunities to learn and create right out of the box.

Collaboration or other connected learning opportunities are less apparent, but I think it’s worth considering further, even to the point that ed tech bloggers come up with a “best practices” list of ways to support engaged learning through these and other laptops (something the OLPC focuses on with Sugar).