TrackStudio – found what I’ve been looking for?

Wow… sounds too good to be true finally.

After searching for a good helpdesk/ticketing/project management solution for distributed project teams for over 1,5 years without really finding what I wanted today I came across TrackStudio and I think with

  • Hierarchival Task Management and Work Breakdown Structure
  • Field-Level Visibility per user role
  • Inheritance of project structure setups (that means setting up

the three major features I was missing in so many “small scale” systems out there seem to be in place.

I haven’t tested this solution yet, but with an enterprise license including source-code (java) for around $3k this is one piece of software that every bigger project should be able to afford even for it’s own sake… not to mention a bigger project organization.

What impresses me further are a broad range of (soap-based) integration options

  • into SCM systems CVS and SVN out-of-the-box
  • into Outlook (out of the box?!)
  • into the whole MS office app palette (I want to see THAT!)
  • and so many more…

and finally a hefty user security thing, tons of e-mail subscription and e-mail submission features (even for time-tracking! hi trackertool - I spent 8 days today on task #424 LOL)

The workflow features deserve a separate mention - TrackStudio allows you to specify and enforce your tracking process through states and state transitions… that’s per project … and of course you might have different project types like marketing project, software project, evaluation project, procurement project, employee hiring project etcetc in your organization, don’t you?

some goodies:

  • Web-based workflow editor
  • Complete workflow customization: states, transitions, etc
  • Unlimited numbers of workflows, states and transitions
  • Multiple workflows per project
  • Multiple task categories per workflow
  • Dependent task categories
  • Workflow inheritance WOW.. that’s what you want
  • Per-project workflow customization,
  • Per-workflow customizable fields /fancy!/
  • Elapsed time history recorded in the database with comments
  • Workflow and e-mail notification integration

I must admit after finding my major requirements fulfilled I must take a look at the requirements list I made over 2 years ago for the prospective tracking tool to see if there’s anything missing… my gut feeling says that time-tracking, accounting and invoicing might play a minor role, so i’ll check out features for that and integration into existing systems out soon.

They offer a hosted solution at $40 / month for the professional edition for 20 users AND there’s a 30day trial available - so I have nothing to lose but signup and learn more… 🙂

PS: these guys mentioned that if you find a tool that covers their functionality, they will link and advertise it own their own site… cool