Using MS Project is a bit of a right of passage for most people that have done project management in an enterprise scale. While many have grizzled and grumbled about the application, for a long time it was really the only one that would allow you to do what you needed to get done. What made it worse was between 1998 and 2010, there had been little new in terms of functionality and user interface that made life easy. With 2010 (and 2013) with the development of Project Server, Microsoft has added a few useful functionality.

A lot of web development folk had already deserted MS Project (or never used to begin with). The likes of Basecamp and Jira had been very popular. But there remains a good proportion of traditional PMOs that will require you to provide information and updates in MS Project format. So we could never really get rid of it.

Also gone are the days when everyone in the enterprise uses a bog standard OS and store things in a common location on the network. People are more mobile. BYOD is pervasive in most organisations. Many use Mac laptops, iOS or Android devices while on the move. If you subscribe to Office 365 on a Mac, you cannnot event get MS Project. While Microsoft addressed some issues with Project Server, many of its Project Web Access functionality didn’t work properly outside IE.

I recently came across Gantter from smartapps.com. I am pretty impressed by what I see. The main Gantt view pretty much looks like MS Project. Rather than taking a lot of MS project functionality, they look to have taken the most used ones – tasks, resources, calendars, and baselines. It has even added one thing that plagues most Project Managers (and ends up getting managed in spreadsheets) – Risks!

Gantter can be integrated with Google Drive or Apps and allows you to have real time editing and chat with other Google users. It also allows you to save your projects into your OneDrive or DropBox storage. It can load projects from MS Project and also export to that format. There are plenty of default templates to get you going, or you can create your own. The best part is … it’s free. No longer do you have to pay exorbitant fees for MS Project.

I’ve only just started using Gantter. So final judgement is still pending. However, based on what I can see to date, MS Project’s days may finally be numbered. Even if you’re forced to report in that format by your customers.

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