not sure what to call it so the thread title is the best I could come up with but does anyone know of a free project info. management software? Basically something that can be used to organize a lot of information on a project I am working on that I dont want to get out of hand.

I considered making a wiki of the project but that might take a bit longer than I am wanting to spend. I will probably end up just doing something in Word but wanted to see if anyone knew of any free option.

[Edited on June 18, 2009 at 11:13 AM. Reason : d]

6/18/2009 11:09:43 AM

<---NEED!!!!!!

everything costs so damn much and/or is tedious to set up. let me know if you find something!

6/18/2009 11:11:42 AM

This is what I found after 20 seconds of googling:

http://www.ganttproject.biz/

[Edited on June 18, 2009 at 11:18 AM. Reason : I lost.]

6/18/2009 11:17:13 AM

http://www.dotproject.net/
http://www.taskjuggler.org/
http://www.project-open.org/
http://openproj.org/openproj
http://www.openworkbench.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eberom/

6/18/2009 11:17:40 AM

^^ thats more project scheduling and management... found plenty of those, not exactly what I am looking for

^ same thing with all of those...


Picture that you were writing a book on something very complicated and you kept finding information on a lot of topics to go into the book and you wanted a program that could keep track of everything and keep it all organized... what would you use?

[Edited on June 18, 2009 at 11:22 AM. Reason : d]

6/18/2009 11:19:39 AM

hm

what are you trying to do then? i mean, what sort of information are you looking to organize?

it honestly sounds like a wiki is the best option...

^yeah. i'd use a wiki for that. we do a bunch of stuff like that where i work and we basically have a massive wiki of tons and tons of collected knowledge

[Edited on June 18, 2009 at 11:29 AM. Reason : WIKI THAT SHIT]

6/18/2009 11:21:44 AM

WIKI THAT SHIT

6/18/2009 11:27:57 AM

http://www.huddle.net/

maybe Google Wave once it's out

6/18/2009 11:30:07 AM

what is a good free wiki? there are a TON out there to sort through.


Would want ease of use/entry over features

and either hosted online (but with the ability to make it private) or maybe a stand alone program

6/18/2009 11:32:10 AM

http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=8&cat=Wiki

6/18/2009 11:39:37 AM

^ shit was too complicated... downloaded a few and was lost

6/18/2009 11:44:59 AM

DEVONthink

6/18/2009 11:52:53 AM

yeah, i don't need gantt charts or scheduling. i need something searchable so if we label the market type, year constructed, construction cost, etc, i can find it. archioffice would be awesome but it's $china

6/18/2009 11:54:37 AM

One Note

It costs a little, but not much.

6/18/2009 12:49:22 PM

i messed around with that and, maybe i couldn't figure it out, but it didn't do what i wanted it to. i need searchable, sortable, labeled fields.

[Edited on June 18, 2009 at 2:28 PM. Reason : ]

6/18/2009 2:28:02 PM

mediawiki is the de facto standard

6/18/2009 4:39:44 PM

Quote :

"shit was too complicated... downloaded a few and was lost"

You don't download them, you dumb fuck. You can preview their functionality on the web site. That's what it's for.

6/18/2009 4:42:11 PM

fyi dotproject is fucking terrible.

6/18/2009 4:44:41 PM

^^ sigh... I then went to their website and downloaded them

6/18/2009 6:29:10 PM

Quote :

"One Note It costs a little, but not much."

Seriously, this is exactly what OneNote is for.

Free 60 day Full Trial: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx?ofcresset=1

And it's $65 on Amazon. I've used it for years to keep track of project research, and documenting decisions. Never found anything close to it in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

6/18/2009 7:56:04 PM

I actually already have OneNote... just never looked into it

6/18/2009 8:52:11 PM

and here comes Noen with the obligatory microsoft sales pitch

6/18/2009 10:34:20 PM

^can you think of anything better? If there's a free alternative, I'd be very interested in checking it out.

Wiki websites are a pain in the ass for this kind of information management, and I haven't seen any other client apps that can handle arbitrary content types easily.

6/18/2009 10:47:13 PM

oh shit we have a Microsoft person in here?

add functionality to SharePoint so that i can import project plans from Microsoft project plz and have them sync in both directions

6/18/2009 10:49:07 PM

seriously, you'd think Noen was getting commission as hard as he pushes this shit

6/19/2009 12:39:48 AM

http://www.basecamphq.com/tour

free for a single project


OneNote is great but you violated one of his requirements....which is free of cost.

[Edited on June 19, 2009 at 1:02 AM. Reason : dur]

6/19/2009 1:01:15 AM

http://www.projectpier.org/

Has a lot of good features. You can manage multiple projects, give specific people access to particular projects, assign tasks, etc.

6/19/2009 1:10:13 AM

dude, he is asking for an information management solution, not a project management solution. Unless I'm just totally misunderstanding here.

There's a big difference. Basecamp (and every other CMS/PMS) does a super shitty job of this.

Information management is all about being able to document and organize the information you create and use to make decisions (research, interviews, explorations, meeting notes, discussions, video and audio recordings, and whatever else) on projects. This is totally different from the artifacts you create during a project, or the management of the actual project. It's the meta-data that informs decisions.

6/19/2009 2:07:48 AM

And SharePoint sucks donkey at this too. Actually SharePoint sucks donkey at everything. I hate SharePoint with such passion... basecamp is pretty damn awesome

6/19/2009 2:11:00 AM

ahh, i misunderstood his post. I thought he was talking about organizing both the project and information about it.

[Edited on June 19, 2009 at 11:03 AM. Reason : .]

6/19/2009 11:00:58 AM

^^^ correct

6/19/2009 12:54:42 PM

If all you need to do is organize information about objects wouldn't a spreadsheet work?

Or if you needed to save non-text things, access or SQL?

[Edited on June 19, 2009 at 3:16 PM. Reason : video]

6/19/2009 3:16:00 PM

^ it not just numbers, text of varying size, and I would like to be able to cross reference etc.

6/19/2009 3:19:42 PM

Wolfmarsh
All American
3968 Posts
user info
edit post

Quote :

"One Note It costs a little, but not much."

[quote]
i messed around with that and, maybe i couldn't figure it out, but it didn't do what i wanted it to. i need searchable, sortable, labeled fields.[/quote

Seriously, One Note does this very very well. You can screenshot info and it will reliably recognize the text in it and make that searchable. You can type notes and search them. You can sort in sections in at least three levels right on the surface and as many more as you need them. You can flag a place in a note and make it interact with Outlook for calendaring and contacts. You can make links to files right on a note.

Used it for a year on a tablet PC to take in class notes, worked amazingly well. The best part for lecture notes in class was that I could copy and paste graphics from the web/the instructor's powerpoints/a digital version of the text right in and next to my chickenscratch handwriting. Made it pretty easy to go back and understand, too.

6/19/2009 11:48:12 PM

It also supports audio and video recording that is automatically time-coded to your notes and other content as you record. For lectures/interviews/etc, you can record video and audio while taking notes. then when you go back to the notes, it automatically takes you to the point in time of the audio/video when you took the note

6/20/2009 12:18:05 AM

Since we're on the subject of SharePoint, why the hell cant I include content when I save a workspace as template???

This has made my life exponentially more difficult

6/20/2009 12:21:58 AM

^because sharepoint is an abortion. in fact, it's worse than an abortion but it's too late right now for me to think of a correct analogy.


also, if you have os x, there are a shitload of good note-organizing/taking apps like this.

[Edited on June 20, 2009 at 3:59 AM. Reason : .]

6/20/2009 3:56:41 AM

^like what?

6/20/2009 5:50:45 AM

http://docs.google.com
http://www.wikispaces.com

just because basecamp came up: (this isn't free)
http://www.backpackit.com

6/20/2009 8:21:14 AM

Seriously, OneNote is the best at this (just check out the numerous comments on LifeHacker about it). My wife has been using it for prepping for her Pathology boards and she says she doesn't know what she would do without it (she has pictures of slides, clips from 5 years worth of articles from 8-10 different professional journals, excerpts from textbooks, her own notes, etc... believe her data is over 4GB now). I've heard its very popular with law school students. The only real alternative I can think of is Evernote (a product LifeHacker is actually involved in), but I found that OneNote just had so much more polish, more features, and simply ran better.

#1 - OneNote
#2 - Evernote
... big gap...
#3 - personal wiki
#4 - everything else

6/21/2009 12:30:08 AM

If you are using oneNote, try out Canvas for OneNote: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/canvasforonenote/Pages/default.aspx

Gives you an infinite canvas to organize, group and visualize all your stuff. Just another way to use your data (note, it's a very very early release, I would use it on a copy of your real stuff).

6/21/2009 2:58:20 AM

http://basket.kde.org/index.php

6/21/2009 12:26:13 PM

^Now that is pretty awesome looking! Have you used it? Impressions?

Is there any Windows or Mac version, because no chance in hell of installing leenux

6/21/2009 3:18:29 PM

bttt for a shoutout for Personal Brain.

It's a visual relational database. It's a way to organize and document thoughts. With the free version the thoughts can be linked to web pages. In the cost version ($150) you can link thoughts to documents, file structures, etc.. It's searchable and visual. Give it a try.

http://www.thebrain.com/

There are a number of demos on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTNlRPAq3gE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFyJKBS0NEc

7/5/2009 4:30:47 PM

Mindjet.com Mindjet Manager 8 does the same thing as Personal Brain + about 40,000 more pieces of flexible functionality.

Unfortunately it still doesn't do anything for Information Management. This is a pretty barren market space, because its really damn hard to do anything good.

BTW Mindjet gives away their previous release for free every time they release a new version. You can find V7 for free from a couple of places

7/5/2009 7:04:36 PM

Do you need something that puts it up on the intranet for others, or is it just for yourself?

7/6/2009 4:45:52 AM

^OneNote does both.

7/6/2009 7:41:33 AM

Evernote is interesting because you can take a picture of something and evernote can then do a text search within graphics.

P.S. - Don't write off personal brain. It's simple, visually nice, and you can make broad, searchable connections:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFyJKBS0NEc

7/6/2009 12:26:39 PM

in response to basket.kde.org ...

Features coming in 2.0:

2.0

* Be Qt 4 and KDE 4 based. This will allow:
o Available for Windows and Mac OS X, but also use the same baskets on both systems on the same computer
o Import from Windows and Mac OS X applications
o Undo/Redo (using the Qt 4 History framework) + Undo Basket Deletion
o Highlight searched terms in matching notes, with a yellow background color
o Image editor (need to import a very light version of KolourPaint for KDE 4, can be done independently by sombody else)
* A new redesigned engine allowing to:
o A new "document-like" interface from the usability project, without annoying browsing/editing modes and with more one-click-to-do-everything
o Print
o Really transparent notes
o New vector-based look
o Solve Enter vs. Ctrl+Enter in text editors
o Live filters / Indexing / Store in a database (for faster loading/access/searching)?
o Show several baskets in different windows, or a basket in several windows (needed to add baskets on the desktop)
o Use threads (load baskets in a separate thread...)

7/6/2009 12:31:18 PM

I gave up and just did it in Word

7/6/2009 1:43:40 PM