Remember ABT's Project Workbench? Now its free!

 

Situation: Loved ABT's WorkBench - where did it go?

Many of us remember, about a decade ago there was a very popular scheduler called Project Workbench.  Loyalists were a lot like Apple users are today, consistently touting the superior features of their favorite scheduling product.  One of the more popular PM conferences of the day was the PLC, which was very much focused on the use of PW.

Then Niku bought ABT and absorbed the scheduler into its more enterprise focused (pick your buzzword) resource management suite.  Eventually Niku was bought by CA and now the larger enterprise software package is known as Clarity.   In a pretty cool move, they pulled the covers off of the Workbench source code and created Open Workbench.

You can tell this isn't just a "cheap way to go" package by looking at the philosophical differences in the comparison between OW's approach and what you see in the 2003 version of MS Project.  Now MS Project 2007 is completely rebuilt from the ground up on the SharePoint platform and some of the new features incorporate some of the thinking you see here.  The whole "task-driven" approach is something they've taken a hard look at, but we'll talk about that in a later posting...