LinuxWorld: SaaS rival to Microsoft Project goes open source

Computerworld - A young maker of Web-based project management software is jumping head first into the open-source world as a way to woo users from the dominant, but possibly vulnerable, Microsoft Project.

Projity Inc. is releasing a free desktop version of its 18-month-old Project-On-Demand service. Called OpenProj, the still-in-beta software will be bundled with several leading flavors of the Linux operating system, according to an interview last week with Projity CEO Marc O'Brien.

Confirmed distributions so far include Mandriva, Mint and the Gentoo-derived Sabayon. All are among the 10 most popular Linux distributions, according to DistroWatch.com.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Projity is also talking with OpenOffice.org and Sun Microsystems Inc., the maker of StarOffice, about integrating OpenProj in some fashion with their open-source productivity suites, O'Brien said.

Finally, Projity plans to invest "significant resources" into driving the creation of an open standards document format for project management that would be an alternative to the .mpp/.mpx formats used by Microsoft Project, and would eventually become a subset of the OpenDocument Format natively used by OpenOffice and StarOffice. OpenProj can open Project files and also runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix OSs.

O'Brien hopes these moves will help OpenProj eventually win between 7 million and 11 million users -- making it a true rival to Microsoft Corp.'s market-dominating Project software, which currently claims 20 million users.

"These are not pie-in-the-sky numbers," said O'Brien, who led and sold an earlier Web-based project management software vendor, WebProject, before founding Projity.

He said Project 2007's high price makes it vulnerable. Listing at $599 for a full standard desktop edition and $999 for the professional standard one ($349 and $599 for the respective upgrade editions; server versions of Project cost more), Project 2007 cannot be purchased as part of any of Office 2007's eight bundles.

In an e-mail reply to a request for comment, Irwin Rodrigues, director of the Microsoft Office Project team, said he "respects that customers have an opportunity to choose from a variety of alternatives ... that said, we find that customers make their choice based on business value, and they have consistently chosen Microsoft Office (and Microsoft Office Project) because it gives them the tools they need to be more productive, better able to create documents, collaborate and share information."

Jack Dahlgren, a Silicon Valley-based project management software consultant, likes the OpenProj beta, which he said has a similar look and feel to Microsoft Project but better ease of use.

"My feelings are that OpenProj is significant because it offers cross-platform use of Microsoft Project files," he said, though he thinks Projity's user projections are "quite optimistic."