[Sigia-l] Project tools with good user experience?

[Jamie Foggon]

I work for a digital comms agency of around 70 people. Currently the
main tools we use to run our business are:

An system we built internally for timesheet, resource planning,
project controlling, basic reporting
A system we built internally for sharing project documentation -
project based RSS feeds etc
A separate commercial system for managing the financial side - invoicing etc

The issue we have is that the company is growing and the effort
required to manage invoicing and financial reporting separately to the
project management / timesheet system is getting quite inefficient. We
also want to add an HR module on, ideally linked seamlessly with the
other modules. Currently this is all in excel sheets :-) We'd also
like to integrate the pre-sales process in some way - proposals,
prospects etc all feeding into the overall resource scheduling.

We've seen presentations from a number of companies offering
'e-synergy' or all of this plus 7000 features you don't want. But they
tend to do the basic things really badly. None of them have a resource
scheuling / planning system that works as well as the one we built
(and I designed :-) With some of them, even the timesheet
functionality is awful and really clunky to use.

Does anyone have any useful suggestions? I'm looking for any good open
source applications, or commercial recommendations that might help.
They don't necessarily have to cover all areas - it could be an HR
application that integrates easily with Active Directory for example,
or a financial management application which has a web service
architecture...

Any suggestions welcome!


-- 
Jamie Foggon