Okay.  Yesterday I was bemoaning my memory for being unable to keep track of my workload and personal projects.  Now as shown on the list yesterday the projects my seem fairly benign however a simple to-do list is not enough to remind me of what I am doing. The title of a project does not help me keep track of where I am up to, when there are interruptions due to support/server issues.  As CodeNinja pointed out in his comment:

“I have tested different to-do lists/project tracking systems

I want a web-based one, and would like it to communicate with an iPhone app. but a decent web app would do for starters.”

I had previously been looking for a nice open source, web-based, collaborative  package, and some of those offered certain aspects of what I was after, however I found many of these were overly complex or just too plain basic, and having spoken to CodeNinja I decided to have a look at one of the packages he had looked at previously.

Enter “dotProject”

“dotProject is a volunteer supported Project Management application. There is no ‘company’ behind this project, it is managed, maintained, developed and supported by a volunteer group and by the users themselves.”

Exactly the sort of product I like to use.

After a very simple install (download, unzip, create a database, sort out couple of permissions and run the install page) I was up and running, not only that with in another couple of minutes I had the basis of my first project going.  After a few minutes more I started to really like the package.  Not only was it providing me with the to-do part I was after, but also dependencies, child to-do’s file attachments, which could be checked in and out.  It also provides “Gantt” charts of the project along with progress monitoring of each to-do.

The product goes further than that though, it is a full multi-user product with budgeting, resource allocation, calendars, file management, contact management and a ticketing system to-boot!

All in all I am thoroughly happy with this product and look forward to making it one of the tools I use on a daily basis. I only hope that it will not be a tool that I get side tracked by!