I’m a huge supporter of Open Source programs. Especially, if these programs have a great community backing to help troubleshoot and keep enhancing the program. A few open source programs that you might have heard of are Wordpress, Joomla, and Linux. Wordpress and Joomla are CMS platforms that can be installed on just about any Linux based server. Linux is the operating system that can run a personal computer or a giant server farm. There is a lot a power to be harnessed with open source programs. One of my favorite is called Collabtive.

Collabtive is an open source project manager that can be placed on your server. This project manager allows you to create projects, timelines, schedules, add/remove teammates, and adds a progress bar. Teammates can message each other about the project they are assigned and also upload files to the database. Installing is easy with Linux and MySQL and starting is a matter of creating an Admin account.

Here is the complete list taken from the site (http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/about.php):

Core functionality

• Unlimited projects, milestones, tasklists, and tasks
• Unlimited members with user profiles
• Role-based permission management
• Messaging and instant messaging
• File management
• Timetracking

Reporting and notifications

• Timetracker reports, activity logs and messages in PDF format
• Export user profiles as vCard
• RSS feeds for messages and tasks
• Synchronization of calendars via iCal task export
• Excel files from activity logs and timetracker reports
• E-mail notifications

Other

• Search, tags
• Basecamp import
• Fully themeable
• Available in more than 25 languages
• Full UTF8 support

Let me know what you think of this program! I love it and makes project management easy.