From: nghoff@albert.monsanto.com (Norman G. Hoffman)
Subject: SUMMARY: Project Mgmt Software
Organization: Monsanto Company
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 01:20:12 GMT

ORIGINAL QUERY:

    Can anyone recommend project management software (commercial,
    shareware, or public domain; X or News)?  I'm running OW3 on
    SunOS 4.1.1.

    I'll summarize.

RESPONDENTS:

    Thanks to the following for responding:

    dave@sunarch.Central.Sun.COM (Dave Dickerson - St. Louis SE)
    horen@rs.com (Jonathan B. Horen)
    bob.netherton@dallas.Central.Sun.COM (Bob Netherton)
    rjmeye1@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Randy Meyers)
    Pete Phillips <egh-qc!pete>

SUMMARY OF RESPONSES:

    Here are the products mentioned by the respondents, along with some of the 
    descriptive information they provided or I could find from other sources.

    AutoPLAN
    Digital Tools, Inc.
    18900 Stevens Creek Blvd.
    Cupertino, CA  95014
    Tel: (408) 366-6920
    FAX: (408) 446-2140

	This was the most often-mentioned product.  It's in the Sun's 1991
	Catalyst catalog of third-party solutions, and is thought to be on 
	the Catalyst CDware release 3 cdrom.  It uses X windows and is 
	graphically oriented.  Multiple users can plan and track projects 
	at the same time.  It provides standard reports and an interactive 
	report writer for customized reports.  I have more to say about 
	AutoPLAN in the STATUS section below.

    (product name unknown)
    R Group, Inc.
    316 Songwood Court
    Millersville, MD 21108
    (410)987-1532

	This product was mentioned Randy Meyers, but he didn't know the
	product name, and didn't say anything about the product.
	I didn't find R Group in the Catalyst catalog.

    Ultra Planner
    Productivity Solutions

	- runs under Motif and OpenWindows
	- expensive -- about 2000 pounds list for single user on a Sun
	- very easy to use and set up
	- good for big projects with lots of sub-projects
	- Does all the usual things like Milestones, baselining, Gantt Charts,
	  materials costing, allows calendar units of hours, days or weeks,
	  connecting projects into a hierarchy, importing from files, export to
	  files, project consolidation and network charts.
	- intuitive, and good for workstation use
	- works under a total GUI (everything is accomplished in X)
	- heavyweight and comprehensive package
	- graphic reports for Gant/Network charts with optional graphic package

	This product was mentioned by Pete Phillips.  I found neither
	the product name nor the company name in the Catalyst catalog.

    MasterPlan
    Unipress Software, Inc.
    2025 Lincoln Hwy.
    Edison, NJ  08817 USA
    Tel: (908) 287-2100
    Tel: (800) 222-0550
    Fax: (908) 287-4929

	- about 900 UK pounds for a Sun.
	- not GUI based, it has a nice Lotus-like feel 
	- baselining, Gantt charts, resource costing, fixed costs
	- Pert/Network charts, ascii import/export of project data. 
	- supports various devices for reports (but not the Gantt charts!)
	- runs under an ASCII interface (so it can be run on dumb tubes).
	- some graphs (but not the network graphs) may be looked at under X
    
    MasterPlan 
    Quality Software Products
    5711 W. Slauson Avenue
    Suite 240
    Culver City, CA  90230  USA
    Tel: (213) 410-0303
    Tel: (800) 628-3999
    Fax: (213) 410-0124

	This is another product called MasterPlan which I found in my 
	Catalyst catalog, and there may be some confusion between the two.
	Their descriptions in the catalog sound similar.

    VUE
    National Information Systems, Inc.
    4040 Moorpark Avenue
    Suite 200
    San Jose, CA  95117 USA
    Tel: (408) 985-7100
    Fax: (408) 246-3127

	- "UNIX Project Management Package"
	- the IRS, among other agencies, bought thousands of copies
	- originally introduced in 1977 for mainframes
	- ported to workstations and MS-DOS.
	- Apparently is on numerous UNIX platforms

	I have the UNIX Workstation Fall 1992 Products Catalog from INMAC.
	It talks about a product called "ACCENT GraphicVUE" from "NIS", which
	sounds suspiciously like this product.  (The catalog doesn't provide
	company details.)  The pictures show Gantt and Pert charts.  The 
	article confirms the notes above.  Here are some additional excerpts:

	- mouse-driven GUI, with intelligent zoom function & color selection
	- multiple project scheduling
	- cost/resource rollups across projects
	- multiple calendars
	- user-defined work breakdown structure codes
	- standardized and custom report-writing subprogram
	- on-line help
	- first floating license $2950, add'l 2-5 $1750, fixed $1450
	- support fees: first floating $450, 2-5 floating $275, fixed $275
	- support fee required for first year

    Pete Phillips sent me what he calls "PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE - A SORT 
    OF FAQ", "LAST UPDATED: 28th October, 1992".  It's a collection of newsgroup
    articles on the subject.  I've included most of the products it mentions 
    in this summary.  Concerning public domain software, one of the articles 
    dated 21 Jul 92, from usenet@news.duc.auburn.edu, says:

	A group of computer science seniors here at Auburn University 
	implemented a simple project management tool a few quarters ago. 
	It provided a memo and scheduling utility for multiple users and an
	interactive Gantt chart tool among its features. It was implemented
	using the Athena widget set and it provided rudimentary PostScript
	output. ... I could try to locate the students and see if they would
	mind posting the source code somewhere.

    Pete says as far as he knows, this has not been posted.

STATUS:

    I talked with Digital Tools on the phone.  They've been in business since 
    1988, and currently have 55 employees.  AutoPLAN was first released in 
    June of 1991.  The current release is 1.2.1, with release 2 scheduled for 
    1Q93.  Floating licenses are $2995; node-locked licenses are $1495.  
    Optional maintenance is $450/license/year.  Apparently there is no
    discount for additional licenses.

    We've obtained a 30-day evaluation copy for $49.  I've only spent a few 
    hours installing and playing with it.  It appears to work as advertized, 
    but seems a bit rough around the edges.  Here are several examples:

	- We've changed our default font from 12 point Lucida Sans Typewriter
	  to 14 point bold Lucida Sans Typewriter.  AutoPLAN doesn't take this 
	  larger size into account, so buttons overlap each other and text 
	  overflows fields.

	- When I started their tutorial by opening a sample project, AutoPLAN
	  displayed the entire Pert chart in its window.  The tutorial said 
	  to "select the activity named DATADESN", but I couldn't find it 
	  because the titles in each activity box were small, truncated, and
	  hard to read.  (As I zoomed in, the letters grew and became readable.)

	- When I zoomed in on a small section of the Pert chart, I then
	  wanted to pan to different area, but there were no horizontal
	  and vertical scroll bars as I expected.  Panning is accomplished
	  via arrow keys, with arrow, shift-arrow, and control-arrow key
	  sequences panning the chart by various amounts.

    We have the regional manager coming in to give a demo next week.
    I'll see what he has to say about these and other issues.

    I think we're going to check out VUE, too.

If anyone would like a copy of the responses I received, let me know by email.
If anyone is interested in additional information I obtain about AutoPLAN, 
VUE, or other products, let me know by email and I'll keep you up-to-date.
If there is sufficient interest, I'll summarize at the end of our evaluation.

Norman G. Hoffman
Research Computing Consortium
Monsanto Company
700 Chesterfield Parkway North
St. Louis, Missouri  63198
Phone: 314-537-7018
Email: nghoff@bb1t.monsanto.com