Washburn Project Management Group, LLC provides project and portfolio governance, planning, management, execution advice, and training. WashburnPMG also provides technical support services to clients using FOSS and LAMP solutions for project and project portfolio management.
www.Washburn-PMG.com is Built on Open Source Technology
The webserver's OS is SuSE linux, running the Apache web server compiled with support for MySQL and PHP. The home site pages are brought to you by generating web pages with Perl and the Template Toolkit. The featured applications on the demonstration ProjectSite are dynamic web pages generated through PHP templates relying on PEAR, Smarty, and MySQL.
For more detail, please take a look at What's in the ProjectSite.
Comments and questions are welcomed by the webmaster, but we invite you to offer feedback via the ProjectSite forums.
-- Top --Open Source is a Good Thing
We believe strongly that Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) can provide comercial-strength, solid-performing alternatives to expensive commercial offerings that are often out of reach for small and medium sized businesses or divisions.
Don't be too skeptical. Open Source these days offers some stable and mature offerings that sometimes rival those from more traditional, proprietary sources. Staid companies like IBM, HP, and Red Hat - among many others - offer support for FOSS products. In so doing, they remove objections that FOSS might not be supportable. With growth in your own team's experience managing FOSS, supportability becomes less and less a risk.
FOSS offers some distinct advantages worth considering.
FOSS offers some distinct advantages worth considering. Certainly acquisition cost is one that leaps to mind. It is this aspect that may allow rapid prototyping and implementation without having to "bring along" the CFO.
Another advantage is that you possess and are encouraged to use the source code to enhance, customize, or tailor your FOSS application -- however and whenever needed. Even better, there are many companies and even more technically talented implementors, software engineers, and users deploying, improving, and sharing successes that you can then test and put into use for your own company.
FOSS is Free as in Freedom
Just don't become confused about the free part of the name...
Just don't become confused about the free part of the name - it means free as in freedom to use, share, and enjoy. The dollar cost, on a cost of ownership basis, must include the costs of tailoring, the cost of skilled labor to maintain, and the cost of monitoring and maintaining software from many separate sources. Still, in my mind these costs are amply overtaken by the benefits. In fact I consider many of the costs to be investments, as dollars go toward improving the skills of my team members vs. to a vendor as a license fee.
-- Top --Consider a Low-Risk Pilot
So take a look at the demonstration applications on ProjectSite and see if these capabilities would justify a pilot project with low risk, low-impact on your infrastructer, and high-impact on your team's ability to deliver. Simply plugging in a stand-alone server with these applications loaded, entering your specific data (like accounts, projects, financial codes, etc), and informing your team of the url get's you off the ground for a motivated group. There is lots of documentation on the host sites for these applications and the ProjectSite gives you a jumping off point to any of these projects from a single location.
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