Marco Cevoli, Sergio Alasia, Carles Fernández, Founders of Qabiria |
]project-open[ - Our experience: do it yourselfKey facts about Qabiria Qabiria was recently founded by three professional translators, sharing similar and complementary fields of specialization, who decided to put their more than 20 years of overall experience to good use and offer translation companies what they need most: reliability and technical expertise. The choice Since the beginning Qabiria did not plan to have a physical location, so we needed a powerful ERP software accessible at any time through the Internet and capable of storing and classifying all the information about staff, projects, customers, providers, finance, etc. First steps and decision When planning to start using or switch to a different project management software, the best way to approach ]project-open[ is to enter its online demo (http://pcdemo.dnsalias.com/), and to spend some time reading the documentation available on-line, in order to better understand how the program works. At this stage, ]project-open[ can be downloaded from the Internet and installed it on a machine, for which some computer skills are needed. The version available is complete and does not have any time restrictions to its use. There are several possibilities, but we chose to download the version installed on a Linux virtual machine, which can run either on a Windows or Linux system using free VMware software. It could sound complicated, but this solution really simplifies the whole process. Installation instructions can be found on ]project-open[ and VMware websites. We have successfully installed ]project-open[ virtual machine on a Linux openSuSE operating system, and it is running almost uninterruptedly since then without problems. Starting to use ]project-open[ Installation is completed after a first customization through the configuration wizard, where you can choose to install a “clean” system or a “demo company” with a number of users and projects available for training. Finally, when the users feel confident enough all demo contents can be erased and the “production” use will start by filling in the contact information for users, companies, new and existing projects, etc. For those companies which are already running another project management system, there is a rollout plan available to easily migrate to ]project-open[ , in which both systems are running together for a while. Production In our experience ]project-open[ fulfilled our needs completely since the first day. Based on OpenACS and PostgreSQL, it integrates a powerful search engine which avoids you to scroll lists that in time can become very long, finding instantly anything, as practically every data base field is indexed. Next steps Qabiria is now looking for a programmer in order to contribute to the project by improving the existing code, adding some new feature and customizing others. WEB: http://www.qabiria.com |