Goplan: First Look

Posted on October 23, 2006 2 Comments

Goplan logo I received my beta invite to Goplan about 4 weeks ago. This weekend I finally found the time to sign-in and have a look around. My initial take on things is favorable. This could be a boon for small companies or small team projects, but I’m curious about pricing plans. Will this be a 37signals campfire or Zoho Project competitor? I poked around their blog, but didn’t see any pricing info or plans.

So what does Goplan show after a project is created? Quite a bit, actually. First of all, when creating the project, you get to make some choices about what the project will have associated with it:

Public weblog (a blog that will be publicly available)

Chat rooms (web-based chat where you can discuss with your teammates or clients)

Calendar (you can use the calendar to create events like milestones or new releases)

Tickets (Issue tracking)File management (upload and share files with people that have access to this project)

Notes (notes can be used to tell other users about this project’s updates)

Task management (tasks can be used to describe (and discuss) something that should be done)

All of those are pretty self-explanatory. Well, actually they’re all explained right there in the list so not too hard to confuse.

I looked at this from the perspective of how we might use this at my day job: a 40 person, young, technology start-up. What follows are some thoughts or impressions.

The public weblog isn’t all that interesting to me (yet). Down the road as some of our projects become products I see more interesting uses for that; especially from a marketing perspective.

Chat rooms? Maybe interesting just to have the logs right there in the project management tool. However, a lot of the more interesting chats are often with our clients’ QA or Product teams… and I’m not quite ready to hand them accounts into our project tracking system! That being said, for internal discussions around requirements, scope and technical discussions this would seem to fit the bill quite nicely. Habits would have to change though as right now we all just jump on with the IM clients we’re used to using.

Calendar is always interesting for the Project Manager and typically ignored my the design/develop crew. hehe. I like seeing tasks with due dates show up here though. That’s a nice touch, but lacking one key piece that I’ll touch on shortly.

Tickets. Hmm… well, truth be told we’re pretty settled into the FogBugz scene for our tickets. Internally though, these could be interesting. The pricing model again raises its head here: If I have to “buy seats” for my external clients to be able to write tickets, well I already deal with that with FogBugz… but if seats are cheap/free then I could really see getting into this with my side business clients (where I don’t use something like FB). The Tickets stuff is well put together and only lacks a few key things that I haven’t found yet: Customization for priority and severity terms and notification features. I’d like to, at a minimum, be able to generate emails when a ticket is assigned (to the assignee) or modified (to the ticket originator).

Notes are nice. I like notes. I’d like to be able to organize (or tag?) notes to help a bit with the organization of them though. I have to categorize tasks and files, why not notes?

Task Management has the usual stuff you might expect — and some quirks.
Quirk 1: You don’t assign tasks to people. I’m hoping that’s just an oversight (I sent feedback asking for it and got a reply indicating it’s already in the dev version that we should see in a couple weeks).
Quirk2: Tasks are in Task categories. Or in other words, task categories are how task lists are organized and presented. If your project has x categories, then it can have x task lists. Want an uncategorized or general category? Create it yourself. Not a tragic hardship, but seems odd.
You can write comments for tasks, but they’re not readily apparent unless you hover over the task (sent feedback on that too).

Finally, there’s a files section that allows you to upload and store files. Works as expected. Files are categorized to help organize them. My initial test file upload didn’t fare so well. Perhaps as 12MB PDF was too large? (oops, I see that there’s currently a 3MB limit).

It took me a while to realize that there are no user roles in this app. Every user has the same permissions. In one way that seems rather liberating. In other respects it may be rather terrifying!

Tasks and Files each need a category. Perhaps it’d be nice to have a common set of categories to use for both — and for Notes as well? (and yes, I sent feedback on that too.)

Using this app is a pleasure. It’s easy to figure out, no need to scramble for help documents as everything is either very intuitive or made obvious with helpful text prompts to guide you along. It’s nicely “Ajax’d for your pleasure” as well. Another plus is it is easy on the eyes (which is fortunate as I didn’t see any options to tweak colors).

Now I just would like to learn more about pricing/licensing and then figure out if this makes sense for use at the office. It definitely has a lot of appeal for my “nights and weekends” business.

Tags: beta, goplan, project-planning, web2.0, webreakstuff