For the want of a collaboration server the battle was lost…
Because The Portable Consultant was exposed to document management at an early age he has lusted after DM and collaboration tools on virtually (pun intended) every project since 1995.

The current contract is no different. At this Fortune 500 organization “customer” departments contact their local “account managers” who contact central “account managers” who may, or may not, enlist the services of project managers, solution designers, and technical architects to design and deploy infrastructure solutions to support the customers applications in one or more central data centers.

Complicated? Yes… and to top it off the processes, organization, and infrastructure services offered change on a regular basis.

The perfect environment for an integrated workflow, DM, and collaboration system?… perhaps one with a project management paradigm? Surely such a group would be making use of the latest in shared online tools.

Such is not the case, however. (But you had already guessed that, right?)

In fact, the collaborative “system” that the group I’m assigned to uses is nothing more an Excel spreadsheet.

The PMO has their own tools, not shared with the solution designers.

A somewhat less than optimal situation for juggling multiple projects – all of the highest priority, of course.

Laptop mash-up? …sounds messy.
Never being one to miss an opportunity to mash-up tools, the Portable Consultant went looking for a way to keep track of his deliverables and the PM’s deadlines.

I’m already running dotProject on a personal web site, but performance was lacking due to a busy Internet connection from the client’s office. As well, clients don’t always like the idea of their project data being stored on an externally hosted server.

To get to the point (finally), I was looking for something of a task-based calendar tool (or is that a calendar-based task tool?) when I came across activeCollab (free, open source… but changing to a commercial model).

Although it didn’t have the calendaring that I was looking for the installation documentation did make mention of two systems for running web-based tools under MS Windows: Uniform Server and XAMPP Lite (both free, both open source).

Both Uniform Server and XAMPP provide the necessary environment for running web ‘sites’ based on Apache, MySQL, and PHP under Windows.

Meeting my deepest needs…
I’m in love.

Not only can I run dotProject, but I can work under the hood of my WordPress blog, this site, entirely on my underpowered laptop.

Although in the past I have used Cygwin to work in a Linux ‘sub-environment’, I found Uniform Server and XAMPP Lite easier to set up and manage.

So, until I finally get around to constructing my Linux laptop – with MS Windows confined to a VMware window – XAMPP Lite will enable me to keep on track with dotProject, explore revisions to my blog, and generally mess around in a familiar LAMP-like environment while disconnected from the Internet.

Cheers,
-pmh

ps: BTW, if you are interested in activeCollab, there appear to be documented problems when running under the current version of Uniform Server but none with activeCollab under XAMPP Lite.

pps: if I understand correctly, activeCollab is going commercial. A community called Project Pier is taking over the OS code for the open source fork. Many of the original activeCollab pages are no longer accessible from the home page (try Google for ‘activeCollab download’ or ‘activeCollab installation’ to reach them if you have problems).