Will storm support the features my organization desires?

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owntheweb's picture

Howdy,
While I haven't had a chance to play with Storm a whole lot yet, I'm very impressed! It seems to kick a lot of competition to the curb. Thanks much for your efforts!!

My organization is in the process of leaving basecamp. While the task lists and such are nice, it's missing features my project manager desires, and just got hugely overloaded with the amount of marketing stuff we were spitting out. She's currently looking into purchasing Microsoft Project which could be good, but is putting up some red flags in my mind. Examples:

  • "It's quite hard to get into I hear, but has more options"
  • "It integrates well with Outlook tasks" (I've never had personal success with Outlook tasks myself)
  • "It costs quite a bit initially"
  • My personal trust in Microsoft software has been minimal.

With that said, I was wondering if Storm would support some or all of the features she desires, even if I need to pitch in to a minor degree with intermediate Drupal experience. Here's some things that she wants that Basecamp lacks:

  • A printable calendar. We have meetings, and she needs to print things for those meetings. In order to print a calendar from basecamp, she connects google calendar to basecamp. That doesn't work well because google doesn't refresh the iCal feed often enough (no way to manually refresh either), and hates having to log on to another site to print a nice calendar anyway.
  • A printable calendar of general project deadlines for all projects
  • A printable calendar of task deadlines for a single project
  • Printable, readable, status report on all projects, and also individual project reports (starting to see the reporting theme?)
  • What projects we're working on now. e.g. "Person 1: What projects are you working on now?" click -> "We're working on these projects right now."
  • gant charts: I don't know what this means yet, but she mentioned it.
  • Timeline of everything going on for schedule planning

I think that about covers it. What are your thoughts on these requirements? I know that Open Atrium has a nice calendar for the most part, but prints calendars like crud. Perhaps I just need to make a print style for those? I'm also hoping to keep some of the nice AJAX functionality for task management and such to keep the process as rapid as possible (we throw a lot of stuff around over here quickly).

While it's ultimately the project manager's decision on what software we use to manage projects, I just want to give additional options if in fact there are better ones to meet the needs.

Thanks for the feedback in advance. Let me know if I can clarify on anything.

Best regards,

Chris

Comments

Hi Chris, I think you'd

juliangb's picture

Hi Chris,

I think you'd probably have to chip in with a fair bit of development to get it to do all that you want. So it probably depends on your time and deadlines.

Storm has all the basic structures, but is a bit clunky and lacks a few of the things that you mention. Easily solved, but needs someone to contribute the patches!

juliangb, Thanks for the

owntheweb's picture

juliangb,
Thanks for the feedback. I'll dig around Storm more and see if there's a fit. If so, I'll share what I come up with. :)

Best regards,

Chris

Worlds to explore. Worlds to create.
Blog: http://www.christopherstevens.cc/blog
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/owntheweb

some similar stuff here

fending's picture

I also have some needs, leaping from Central Desktop to Storm this month, @owntheweb. We should talk offline about sharing some of the custom dev and contrib it back as appropriate, if you're up to all of that. Some of what you're looking for are just some views and well-themed bits (#awesomesauce, I believe they're called ;), but others suggest patches/modules that I share an interest in (charting, for instance, that isn't in contrib or contrib w/ dependencies right now). Many of your reqs are theme layer issues, but perhaps we can pool efforts nonetheless.

Same here

Wes Ashworth's picture

I've got similar needs. I'd also like to have task/event reminders. I'm new here, but will do what I can development wise. Will need guidance.

Thanks,

Wes

Same here

Wes Ashworth's picture

I've got similar needs. I'd also like to have task/event reminders. I'm new here, but will do what I can development wise. Will need guidance.

Thanks,

Wes

Microsoft Project is different than Storm

waltWright's picture

If a single project manager wants to do plain scheduling, then Microsoft Project is hard to beat. It is a mature product.

However, if you are developing a cross-departmental task list / ticketing system, then Storm seems like it might do a great job bringing many people into one interface. The Microsoft equivalent would require Microsoft Project Server and it is quite complex and expensive.

If you can keep your needs simple, then Storm looks like it would be a much less expensive and better supported platform than Microsoft Project Server.

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