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Bugzilla is one of the first open-source tools I've used. It has become my daily tool for managing IT projects. At any given time, I manage over 150 projects for up to 8 staff members and numerous vendors. Without bugzilla, many of those projects would simply fall through the cracks and disappear.
Pros:
Bugzilla has a MySQL back-end that makes it easy to export data to csv (excel) format for reporting and graphing.
Combined with phpMyAdmin, or command-line mysql statements, it offers flexibility and unlimited reporting.
Since it is a web product, it can be run from anywhere at anytime.
It is great for tracking IT support tickets, CSR customer service issues, programming changes, requests for new reports/programs, phone system support, training schedules, client meetings, etc.
We also use it as a documentation tool and as backup to our monthly invoices to customers.
Reporting is very flexible, offering high-level and detailed reports. We enter client name in the 'keyword' field, enabling me to run excel reports for senior management showing IT projects by client.
Products and categories are user-defined.
Cons:
There is no tracking of hours or tracking of project/job numbers. It would be perfect if it only included a field for hours and another field for job#. Of course, these fields can be added since it's open source.
Webcalendar
Webcalendar is another great tool for small to medium sized businesses. It allows all office employees to manage their calendar, while providing access to other employees.
Pros:
When scheduling other employees for meetings, webcalendar will automatically notify you if the employee is already booked at that date & time. You have the option of scheduling anyway (double-booking) or canceling.
You can check another employee's calendar to see their schedule.
When scheduling yourself, you can choose 'public' (default) or 'private'. Choosing 'private' when scheduling personal things will cause the time to be blocked out, but will not show the details to other employees.
The color and look can be customized on a per-user basis.
The backend is MySQL, enabling administration through the admin tool, or through phpMyAdmin.
MySQL data can be exported into csv (excel) format for reporting.
Schedules are easily exported for use in Outlook or Palm PDAs. You can also import into Webcalendar from other formats. I assume this is true of Blackberrys, but I have not yet tried this.
Cons:
I've found that Outlook users tend to dislike Webcalendar because it isn't as cleanly interfaced with their email client. Thunderbird users love webcalendar the way it is.
When entering new tasks, it assumes today's date and you must manually change it to the date you want. Clicking on the specific date square on the calendar would be faster, but is not supported.
I'd love it to interface with our other web apps, so that we can provide single sign on (SSO) functionality to our users. Eventually, I think this drawback will force us to look into other calendar solutions.
Nagios
Nagios is the latest addition to our open-source arsenal and I've been impressed so far. It allows my IT department to monitor the health of the network in real-time. It also provides alerts when a system or service goes down. There are plugins available at SourceForge, but I haven't implemented any of these yet.
Pros:
Real-time network monitoring
Can perform simple 'up' monitoring (ping) or complex service-level monitoring
More complex monitoring includes services, thresholds (for processes & users), disk space, memory usage, etc.
In a large network, it will pinpoint hardware problems immediately, without requiring your network guy to troubleshoot component-by-component.
Will alert on any port, even non-standard ports
Pretty graphs and reports for management-types
Trends and history is collected for reporting as well
Cons:
Not the easiest system to set up, but isn't too bad if you start with examples
Requires client software to perform more complex monitoring (ping-only does not require client software)
Dotproject
Dotproject is an open-source project management tool. It's helpful for fairly large projects, but isn't practical for smaller tasks.
Pros:
Automatic color-coding of overdue tasks makes them easy to find.
MySQL back-end makes exports to csv or excel files easy and painless (a requirement for one of my clients).
Many reports available in pdf format.
Can run projects under different companies -- helpful for consultants.
Calendar feature shows tasks due in calendar format.
Automatically tracks resources (both internal and external).
Gantt charts are useful and some reports can be generated to pdf.
Cons:
Would like the ability to feed my webcalendar, rather than using the dotproject calendar. There is probably a way to do this via export/import, but I haven't spent time trying to figure it out.
A bit cumbersome when many tasks need to be updated.
