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I'm trying to choose a project management and collaboration software for our next project and would like to know your opinion on "enterprisey" SharePoint vs. "lightweight" alternatives like BaseCamp or activeCollab (from the two, I would prefer the latter).

Features that are important to us:

  • document sharing (specifications, manuals etc.)
  • discussion forums (I hate when important information is lost in the inbox)
  • issue tracking
  • Subversion integration would be nice to have but probably neither SharePoint, nor activeCollab currently support it, do they?

Other things like time tracking are less important to us (although nice to have).

When I compare the two solutions, I see these strong points and drawbacks:

  • Killer feature of SharePoint is Office integration. For instance, specification is much better authored in MS Word with styles, image drag&drop etc. compared to a plain HTML textarea and some plain text format. We also use Outlook quite extensively so it would be good if we could leverage this tool.
  • activeCollab is web based and has a slick user interface which is important for adoption in our company (if our devs don't find the solution easy to work with, they will not use it). My boss also kind of likes easy solutions and activeCollab wins easily in this area.

Regarding price, activeCollab is something like few hundreds dollars (reasonable one time cost) but I'm not too sure about SharePoint. If I'm right, the basic "SharePoint Services" version would be enough for us (I don't think we need the full MS Office SharePoint Server) and in that case, we need only Windows Server licence (which we already) and a SQL Server licence (would SQL Server Express work? or do we need at least workgroup edition?). This means that even SharePoint doesn't need to be too expensive if we go for the lowest edition.

Is there anyone who did the same comparison and could possibly provide more insight?

Borek Bernard
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6 Answers6

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SharePoint services can be used with SQL Express. For full text search support, do not forget to download SP2 with advanced features : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/ . So If you have a 2003 server licence, you're all set.

Currently, we manage a few projects using WSS V3. It's going quite well, we've implemented issue tracking with a custom list, and document sharing is very efficient (it's the base of WSS).

mathieu
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If you went with SharePoint, you would only need the base, Windows SharePoint Services, not Microsoft Office SharePoint Services. Between that, plus the fact that Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is now free, you should do fine.

You will need to add an issue tracking system, though you could start with the built-in issue tracking list, and then customize it. In particular, it's fairly simple to add workflow to any list, and SharePoint workflows are based on Windows Workflow Foundation, meaning that you should be able to integrate with anything. You might do the same for your subversion integration.

John Saunders
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  • Thanks for the info. We can't spend too much time on customization, though. What level of issue tracking would we get out of the box? Is it usable for basic bug logging and processing? – Borek Bernard Apr 05 '09 at 17:57
  • The OOB issue tracking is not specific to software. OTOH, if you just need to add columns or play with the appearance, you can do that just in the SP UI, no code or tools. Same with basic workflow. – John Saunders Apr 05 '09 at 18:42
  • The next step would be "Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer", which is free as of 1-Apr-2009 (no fooling): http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/FX100487631033.aspx. Again, no code, but deep functionality for customization. – John Saunders Apr 05 '09 at 18:43
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Opengoo has all of the features you mention -except subverion integration, but including time tracking.

I see it as something in between basecamp and sharepoint. The only thing for which may be weaker is in office integration, thou I think fengoffice offers an office plugin.

Someone did a comparison of opengoo vs activecollab. I'll post it here when I find it.

edit: Here is the link: http://forums.opengoo.org/index.php?topic=617.0

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More people here are familiar with SharePoint, so let me provide answers from activeCollab perspective:

Document sharing and collaborative work on files is mainly on project level, done through Files section. There's also Global Documents section, but it's limited in functionality because it's made for sharing only and lacks collaborative features (no comments, revision tracking etc).

Files section features support for good old binary files (can't be edited in activeCollab itself, but you can download them, update them and upload new version), text documents (HTML documents that can be edited from within activeCollab's main interface), bookmarks and YouTube videos. New asset types can be added via third party modules.

Discussions: activeCollab is good at this because it's build to enable collaboration. Each project has a Discussions section (a mini forum), and most elements in the system (files, tasks etc) support comments which makes them discussion points as well.

Killer feature is activeCollab's email integration, that lets you start discussions with email and reply to email notifications and have these replies imported in the system as comments. We found that this greatly increases adoption rate of the application because people can continue to use tools that they are familiar with (email) instead of the need to fully switch to something new.

More info about email integration can be found here: http://www.activecollab.com/features.html#email

Issue Tracking: You can use built in Tasks feature for this, but note that it's not built for issue tracking in particular - it's a general task management implementation. Dedicated issue tracking tools like FogBugz, Bugzilla etc offer more specialized features, but you may find activeCollab's implementation sufficient for your needs.

Version Control Integration: activeCollab 2 had SVN support, activeCollab 3 adds GIT and HG support as well.

Office Integration: We have something in works that will let you work in Office application, and have your changes automatically stored in activeCollab. Since this is work in progress, I can't share any details, but I'll update this comment as soon as that tool becomes available.

Disclaimer: I'm original author of activeCollab. This is reply to an unanswered activeCollab related question, not a sales pitch :)

Ilija
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ActiveCollab now has Subversion integration

Terry Johnson
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i know this post is old, but i currently use both basecamp and activecollab. i handled the install of AC as well and it was about as painless as it gets.

managing it has been a breeze, and yes there is subversion integration.

as a temporary measure, i put fedora on n intel-based mac mini, and installed activeCollab and it runs great (yes, i do offsite database and file backups).

Messy
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