ActiveCollab...Up to scratch?
Posted by Chris Thomas on 27 March 2007
Having been impressed with BaseCamp (a number of our clients are using it internally on projects we are involved with) I spent some time looking around to see what the competition was like, if indeed there was any.
It seems that GoPlan is the current application du-jour, and it includes issue tracking which is missing in BaseCamp. The trouble is that we already have a license for the excellent Jira, and neither GoPlan or BaseCamp are free!
Googling around I found activeCollab; an open source application that makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is taking a BIG cue from BaseCamp in terms of features and interface. That's fine, BaseCamp is excellent. What I like about activeCollab is the fact that we have access to the source code, can host the application ourselves and it is in active development; BaseCamp seems to have stalled in terms of functionality.
Getting it installed was slightly painful. Dependency on MySQL5 and PHP5 meant venturing into the "plus" repositories within the excellent, excellent CentOS but after a little tweaking our setup was complete.
I'll be blogging on our findings as we start using it in anger. Stay tuned.