Do you use it? What do you use? What are the pros and cons?
Such a great question...I have looked at so many of these periodically.
A few years back after looking at many of the I chose and used "Bigtime". It took a bit of tweaking to get it set up for surveying. It tied into Quickbooks so billings and payroll were tied to projects and I could manage and track thing very easily. I was very happy with it. It did not do some of the things that some of the survey-centric programs do such as link into maps and prepare calendars.
The problem came when I had to migrate Quickbooks to a different PC. Bigtime needed to be on the same PC and that meant re-installing it and re-tweaking it all over again (which involved hours on the phone with the makers)..BLAHHH. So in the end we let it go.
Later I wanted to go back to it and found they had solved the co-location issue, but had gone to a subscription based service.
That is the issue I have with many of them. I really don't want to pay the monthly fees that seem to be the wave of things.
Some time later I did start with an online-ish service I cannot remember the name of using hand scanners and bar codes and so forth. It looked promising but again, it needed a ton of tweaking to fit my needs as it was more designed for engineering and it ended up being to expensive.
For now we use Google Calendar to schedule jobs and employee conflicts, which is handy since it can be color coded and can be accessed from any PC (or Droid phone) by all the employees and google has it so you can give separate passwords with differing rights to people. Franky, I like using the google tools and am waiting for them to come out with a good Droid capable project tracking program that will also tie into google maps. Maybe something that will also work with Maptitude of other GIS programs as well!
When I first went into business (many years ago) there wasn't really much on the market, so I created my own with excel spreadsheet.
Twenty years later when I was bought out by a very large engineering firm (2000 employees 35 offices) we were required to use MS Project. In fact some of our clients required there projects to be on MS Project. It is a very powerful program but not easy to learn or use. There are books and online tutorials available.
Now that I'm back on my own in a small business I'm back to a spreadsheet.
I have been using Excel spreadsheets for the larger projects I manage.
A recent client of ours required Microsoft Project but I didn't have anything to do with that project so I haven't learned or even installed it yet. It is still sitting on my desk waiting for an install.
I know Excel well and I can personalize everything to my preference. I guess that's why I keep using it.
I use the web based free servie Trello to organize all of my jobs. www.Trello.com
I use a dry erase board, but it's only me in the office anyway... Not that many projects to manage!
Wow, thanks!! Trello looks awesome. Can't wait to try it out.
