LifeDev

Well, I must say… of all the ranting I’ve been doing for the likes of Basecamp and other 37Signals products as of late, Goplan caught me by surprise. I’m not going to switch from my bread and butter just yet, but I’m definitely going to look long and hard at Goplan in the meantime. They’re definitely cooking something special.
For starters, the guys at WeBreakStuff have really thought things through in terms of functionality. For total comprehensive project management, Goplan has quite a few more features than Basecamp. Here’s a few for starters.

1. Tickets

Tickets are a way to assign/categorize your tasks and “issues” that pop up while developing a product. Goplan has this already figured into the backend, which I really like. HOWEVER, as of right now there is no way to let people outside of your Goplan account to submit tickets, which is where the real beauty lies in ticket tracking. But it’s a start.

2. File Uploading

Although you can have this with Basecamp, you need a paid account. With Goplan you start with 15mb for free.

Score.

3. Project Blog

Not exactly sure what this does because although I see where to write, I don’t see a way to view the blog other than being logged in. So maybe it’s just a blog between developers, which I still don’t understand. If you’re going to have a blog, it should be for the people outside of the project who are dying to know what features or updates are going to be added next. Project notes, chat, support tickets, task lists, etc. should be used to communicate between other developers. Still, it’s an interesting concept and I’m glad they’re thinking about outside communication tools as well.

4. User Permissions

This one’s pretty cool. Granted, these can be had within Basecamp, but with Goplan you have more options on what to do with your users. For example, each user can be configured to have permissions to do a combination of any of these things:

• Edit ACL
• Edit Blog
  
• Edit Tasks
  
• Edit Notes
  
• Edit Tickets
  
• Create Tickets
  
• Chat
  
• Edit Calendar
  
• Files

5. Miscellaneous

Here’s a few smaller features I thought were also cool:

- Ability to assign due dates to tasks, as well as categories and sub-categories for each task

- Create comments for each tasks
- You can easily post code while in the chat room

The Tiny Drawbacks

Goplan has all of the standard features that other project management tools have. While their design is very clean and elegant, there’s one small problem. They haven’t integrated as much ajaxy goodness as Basecamp. I love being able drag and drop my list items, and the ability to re-order lists on the fly. Although it’s a small thing, the user interface lacks some punch because of it.

Another thing that really lacks in most project management tools is the ability to tag all sorts of content (lists, list items, bugs, etc.). When your team is working hard and has a lot of different bugs and lists, it’s nice to have the ability to seperate them even further.

Things I’d Like To See

Other than seeing the drawbacks listed above fixed, I’d also like to see better integration into email. Maybe a way to send emails as tickets in the system. Now that would be a kickin’ feature.

Another great feature that I’d like to see is the integration of GTD into some of these management tools. Given the ability to break tasks down into contexts is a nice thing to have, and it’s a little difficult under the system they have in place. It’s just a smaller request. I know this is just a beta account, so I shouldn’t expect the world yet ;)

Conclusions

Goplan is altogther a very appealing project management tool, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I can’t wait to see what their development team rolls out after their release in a few days. This is going to definitely be a product to watch. Keep up the great work guys!