15-Minute Reviews :: ConceptDraw Project v3.4

Hello and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is ConceptDraw Project version 3.4 by Computer Systems Odessa – A powerful project management application with plenty to help keep you on track.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“ConceptDraw Project 3 is a unique program, designed to help successfully plan and keep track of any number of projects simultaneously.

With the help of ConceptDraw Project 3 it’s easy to manage the resources being shared by different projects, as well as create linkages between them. You can generate various reports to share information about the current state of your project.”

Quick Pros

• Drag and drop support for linking, timeshifting, extending and arranging
• Easy-to-read time charts including mouseover tooltips
• Assign ‘resources’ to projects – Including workers and materials
• Printing options offer a lot of power to help you
• A lot of reporting options to help keep you on track with your projects
• A lot of options to help make managing projects easier

Quick Cons

• Gantt chart too wide for even widescreen format
• Awkward to unlink tasks
• Help file not very comprehensive on methods of use
• Can’t change working days after starting new project
• Lacking direct network support/sharing functionality

Expansion

With all the ‘Task Managers’ this day and age, it is a tight market. ConceptDraw Project attempts to be a much more powerful alternative to the smaller task managers by offering features such as Gantt charts, printable timelines and much more.

I quickly found that while I was creating new tasks, that once outside changing the name of the task, a lot of the time-based alterations could be controlled via drag and drop support. Need 2 extra days on a project? Drag the edge of the block to the right. Need to change a tasks’ start date and its sub-tasks? Grab the whole block and move it. Need to link blocks together for managing project workflow? Click and drag down onto another task. There’s a lot here. There are a lot of right-click pop-up menus as well, making your reliance on the menus minimal. I found the charts were easy to work with and read as well. The mouseover tooltips are handy in that you’re not having to shift your eyes left and right constantly to read information from the left panel. You could almost do away with the left panel for many uses since that the information also shows up in the tooltip or if you click the task comes up in the right-most panel (General.) With this said, the three panels are a little too much for even a widescreen display – I found myself hiding most of the left pane in favor of displaying the timeline and the right panel as well. I’m sure this will be a preference aspect, but something to keep in mind.

One portion of the timeline I felt was awkward was removing the task links. It didn’t flow as well as the rest of the timeline functionality in that right-clicking to unlink didn’t work often – I found myself selecting both tasks and using the menu option – Sometimes it would end up deselected as I right-clicked or similar. Wasn’t very intuitive-feeling.

The assign ‘resources’ page can be helpful for keeping track of what different employees or materials (or even equipment) is allocated to. It is not required to be used however and doesn’t invade your workspace until you start adding resources to tasks. Resource management can help minimize wasted time due to ‘downtime’ from employees or equipment which could be used at the time.

There is a lot of printing options, including printing the Gantt and Network charts, and many forms of reports as well. The print layout for the charts offer you control over time ranges as well – Very handy to eliminate previous tasks that aren’t in scope any longer. With that said, there should be options in printing to hide fully-complete tasks and otherwise, but unfortunately is not that powerful. That said, there should be a way to make complete tasks of a certain age disappear (and reappear) on the project view. It would allow a single project to be used as a task manager as well that doesn’t get cluttered with distracting completed projects.

There are plenty other functionality in the application; Too much to touch on the review. Importing and exporting, integration with ConceptDraw MINDMAP and much more. Check out the features list for more on it.

That said, there are other issues I came upon while using the application. The helpfile is very weak in my opinion; It essentially shows you what menus are there, what the windows are and a little bit on each, but really no help on how to use them effectively – Someone new to Gantt charts and such may get lost very quickly in how to use this application effectively.

I also found out about the working days feature; When setting up tasks, by default it ‘skips’ Saturday and Sunday when you set a duration. I myself for web design, do most of my work on weekends so this is actually counter-intuitive for myself. When I went to change the working days in File->Preferences, nothing seemed to happen to the project. Closed and reopened the project, then the whole application, but unfortunately would not correct my project file to include weekends. I finally had to start a whole new project before it would take the changes – A definite downfall, especially for an individual who may be using this application and has to change his working schedule.

My biggest issue is that this application is that it is geared towards multiple-people (Assignment of resources and such, the ability to export and import XML files and the nature of the project manager.) While there are reports to support a lot of this, unfortunately there is no automated functionality – You have to print it out or upload the HTML manually. It would have been handy to have an FTP client built-in to the application which updated the reports designated as part of the project upon saving the project – It would even be handy to have it incorporate a small web server for authentication purposes so people only see their own projects or only limited privileges of timeframes or upcoming projects.

Final Verdict

While there are a lot of task managers on the market, this doesn’t quite fit there. This is a project manager, for those who need more control over their (or their business’) projects than what a simple task manager would provide. There is a lot of features in this application to make project management easy. For free, it is definitely a good deal with all that you get with the application; It is great for an individual or a small team to control their project more effectively. As for paying $199 for this application, I would definitely expect easier management of the reports with sharing. Many large-scale project managers would likely not know how to FTP this to a site or be bothered with it outside this application. The price is a bit too high for an individual or small group, but lacking features for medium to larger groups to be functional. May make more sense to have two editions available rather than a set-price single version to try to cover both ends of the spectrum.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, June 12, 2007