Project Management, which is, by its nature, a collaborative activity, is perfect for the cloud. To be sure, there are plenty of offerings now. We took a more in depth, hands-on look at TrackerSuite, a pure-play, hardcore project management suite from Automation Center.You can see some of the basic functionality in our ReviewCam below.

There are many project management offerings, like Microsoft Project and Oracle's Primavera (which now has a web-based offering), but we've seen many new models emerge in the cloud, some of which you could classify more as collaborative tools with some project management functionality -- tools like Basecamp, Zoho (with a broad integrated suite of other applications) and IBM's Lotus Live Engage, which my colleague David Berlind did a ReviewCam of earlier this year (see below).

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But TrackerSuite starts with a very project management-centric view, leaving things like chat and social networking to the third party applications. It provides all of the normal things you'd expect to see -- task lists, Gantt charts, role-based controls, document collaboration, workflow, reporting and so on. And it does it all in a very web-centric way.

It can integrate with Outlook for workflow, and it can use document management systems like Sharepoint and Filenet. It starts at $10,000 for a site, and there is a $10 per user (per month) charge on top of that. It runs in Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC, and we ran our ReviewCam in Firefox on the Mac.

For more on this topic, read this excellent piece.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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