Comindwork Piles on Project Management Features

ScreenshotThere are a lot of choices in the online project management space these days. Many of them are influenced by the well-known Basecamp philosophy of carefully keeping the feature set to a minimum in order to focus effort and ease learning. Not so with Comindwork, a product of Kiev-based NewtonIdeas. If you’re looking for an all-in-one management tool for distributed projects, you may want to poke around in their product.

Comindwork includes bits of functionality that you might ordinarily find spread across multiple sites and services. As with just about any other project management software, it will track projects, tasks, team members, and deadlines, as well as the connections between them. But in addition, it includes time-tracking, issue-tracking, internal blogs, and svn-versioned file storage. You probably won’t spend your entire working day here, but certainly it covers a large variety of management and collaborative tasks.

As you might expect from trying to cram so much into a single product, the user interface for Comindwork is rather complex (some would even say “cluttered”). After selecting a project to work with, you’ll find a tabbed user interface broken into Overview, Team, Blog, Wiki, Milestones, Cases, Time and Files. Most of these pages have their own sub-tabs, and a third set of tabs covers History, Search, Reports, and Settings. To combat the complexity, you can get all-in-one views of your project under either Overview or History, and there are comprehensive RSS feeds (as well as targeted email notifications). Search and pervasive tagging make it easier to find information, but Comindwork still feels like there are a lot of “buckets” to put things into, and it’s possible to get lost in the UI unless you spend a lot of time using it.

Other nice features here include time zone awareness, good use of color to indicate urgency, two-click creation of new cases, informative calendars, and a reasonably-nuanced permissions system. You can get a better feel for what’s included by working through the tour on their web site, or clicking through from the tour to a live demo login. Comindwork is available in a free package (limited to 5 projects and 5 users) or several levels of paid plans starting at $29 per month.

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