Collaboration/project management tools for a small distributed team?

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Collaboration/project management tools for a small distributed team?

(4 posts) (4 voices)

Asked 4 years ago by Shane Landrum
Latest answer from denten

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Shane Landrum
Member
I'm starting some contract work on a small, new website for a grant-funded curricular program. Between now and when the site launches, I need to communicate with a small group of non-technical faculty stakeholders/collaborators about all the usual components of a new site: wireframe prototypes, sample graphic designs, current status of work, bugs/enhancement requests, and such. For reasons related to travel and scheduling, it'll be difficult to get everyone in the same physical space before the site launches, and I need some good tools to streamline that communication.

For these faculty, the default communication method would usually be email, but that quickly becomes unwieldy for agile development approaches. For some of what I need, I could cobble something together from Google tools, but I'm not ready to teach humanities faculty how to file bugs/enhancements into a Trac system. I'm looking for something a little cleaner and smoother. I don't have a private server, so I'll need either a hosted service or something that can run happily on a shared webhost.

My software-developer friends in industry tell me that Atlassian Confluence is a really good option for what I need. At $10/month for the hosted version with 10 users, it's cheap, but I'm reluctant to deploy something that'll be an ongoing budget expense unless it really is better than other options (i.e. less work for me). What other tools should I be considering?
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Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Benjamin Gracy
Member

Rally Software's Community Edition is worth mentioning and is free for up to 10 users:

http://www.rallydev.com/product-features/rally-community-edition

The app has a solid team behind it, your data is safe, and there is a community of agile practitioners that can offer support. Full disclosure: I used to work there. I have no familiarity with Atlassian and can't offer any comparison.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Jason Heppler
Member

Replying to @Shane Landrum's post:

Hi Shane,

I've recently begun using Asana, which works well. I originally was going to go with Trac for, er, tracking tasks, bugs, etc. for our distributed team that works on the WFC Archive. But I feel that Trac has a little bit of overhead to grasp before it becomes useful, especially for users who aren't familiar with bug tracking software to begin with. But Asana has been useful. I've divided tasks between General Tasks (which are broken down into separate sections relating to different areas of the Archive), Bugs/Issues for tracking those issues, and Wishlist where we can throw ideas to consider (but don't have a place in our current workplan yet).

Asana is free up to 30 members, it's under active development, you can assign tasks to individual team members, you can get email reminders for tasks that are assigned to you, you can tag tasks, can set due dates, you can leave comments on tasks, you can attach files to tasks. There's a lot the app can do. They also have a mobile version, if you would need that sort of thing. I can't compare it to Atlassian, but I find it easier to use than Trac and might be worth checking out. Some of their how-to videos are also great for seeing some ideas of how they've set up Asana for different purposes.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
denten
Member

I much recommend https://trello.com/ as a light-weight alternative.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink

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