InformationWeek

OnProject.com is a horizontal offering that lets employees, vendors, and clients manage a wide range of projects interactively. What distinguishes this online service is its high-quality interface and easy navigation.

Creating a project and adding team members is simple, with notifications going out by E-mail. Once a project is created, every team member has access to the usual list of features, including a calendar for group and personal events, folders for file storage, a discussion board with nested topics, canned management reports, and a personal to-do list.

OnProject.com can send E-mail notifications for assigned, overdue, and completed tasks. Unfortunately, users are limited to whole numbers when entering hours worked on a particular task. Although this may seem trivial, many smaller tasks take less than an hour and the rounding--even on larger tasks--can add up.

The first thing you see when you log on to onProject.com is an action item overview of your assigned tasks and to-do items, with notices posted above them. The notice board lets users post various public and limited distribution messages.

The project view interface gives users a summary of the projects they're working on, including due dates, the percentage that's been completed, budget, a calendar view of the projects, and project participants. Other tabs provide a task list, resource list, and a Gantt chart called a time line.

The "enter event" feature on the calendar understands start and end times and gave a clear error message when I deliberately entered an incorrect date. Project-related events on the calendar are distinguished from other types of events, such as personal and team items, by different colors--a nice at-a-glance feature.

The threaded discussions are very well organized, but it was hard to figure out how to delete a discussion topic or thread. You can add multiple top-level threads and second-level threads and lower-level replies to replies, which is very helpful for things such as issue tracking. However, this feature isn't a substitute for a more full-featured tracking application such as PVCS Tracker.

Users can subscribe by E-mail to discussion threads and will be notified each time a new message is posted to that discussion. The subscription process is hard to find, but once you figure it out, it's easy to set up.

OnProject.com has more ways to communicate than some competing offerings, which in theory is a good thing. But unlike QuickTeam, a rival offering that offers a chat client, with onProject.com, you're limited to discussion boards and E-mail notifications. However, I don't view this as a defect. Communication between project members is good, but having too many channels of communication can also create confusion and extra work.

OnProject.com automatically creates an empty file folder when a project is created. It also creates general and personal folders. Users can upload a file and make a folder for it at the same time, a nice ease-of-use feature. The file upload worked without a hitch. I could also browse files to find the one I wanted.

Project members can view an uploaded file only if they have the software on their PC. A file viewer for standard file types would be a useful addition. OnProject.com also automatically adds a download file to the file entry.

OnProject.com's project summary report has a wizard that takes users through the steps of creating a report. It gives users the options of viewing and printing the report through the browser or printer-friendly version. The report shows summary information and a Gantt chart. In addition, users can input the data to Microsoft Excel.

The management report also has a wizard interface, but I found it a bit problematic. The wizard doesn't tell you that you can do additional configuration on the projects tab while you are on the basic tab. The management report is a bit confusing because it shows tasks in a manner similar to the task function but with added detail.

Overall, reporting in onProject.com is useful but limited. You can use the Excel format to do more manipulation, but obviously you're limited by the data provided by onProject.com.