Open-Workbench: Microsoft Project Killer?

PM Network, June, 2005 by Essex, David E

This free, open-source scheduling tool is no mere marketing come-on. However, unless your enterprise has Clarity, it leaves you constrained to your desktop.

If you believe the hype coming from the respected project and portfolio management vendor Niku Corp., its decision last year to spin out its Workbench scheduling and project-management tool into a free download, modifiable by any programmer, was a noble blow against the not entirely deserved dominance of Microsoft Project.

Niku claims, in essence, that despite Microsoft's push into enterprise-class project management running on centralized servers and other groupware infrastructure, Project is predominantly a desktop tool used, they say, by solitary project managers to build schedules and crank out Gantt charts. If...