Niku's open-source tool a work in progress
- By David Essex
- Sep 03, 2004
Niku Corp., one of the major manufacturers of industrial-strength portfolio and project management software, announced in July that it was making its Workbench project scheduling tool available for free through the open-source development community.
The company promised to soon make the code available at the open-source development site, SourceForge.net, which in theory should enrich and maintain the software.
I briefly tried the resulting product, Open Workbench, available at
www.openworkbench.org.
Niku also says Open Workbench will become the only version of Workbench. All this adds up to a calculated effort to break the Microsoft monopoly and give Niku customers'but few others'an alternative for their basic project scheduling.
I found version 1.0 barely usable, and not much like Microsoft Project, though I can see strong similarities in basic data-entry and charting.
For now, Open Workbench is an interesting novelty that won't begin to be useful until the fall upgrade, and until developers get their hands on it.