Looking for compatitve information on the functionality of the following tools - Niku 6.1x or Clarity, PlanView, Primavera, PM Office, MS Project Server, Mercury, and Pro Sight. Objective is to create a side-by-side comparison of the above tools. Saving Changes...
I've personally used EPM server and I thought it was a great tool that is easy to use. My organization had Primaavera stand alone and the users said it was very powerful however it was very expensive and has a steep learning curve. Hope that helps. Saving Changes...
I am using MS Project 2007 for pm and I think its the best pm solution, its user friendly and has easy to use management tools. I haven't compared all the epm tool but I can give you MS project comparison link. They have compare project 2007 with earlier versions. Have a look
http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/project-pro-compare.aspx Saving Changes...
Andrew MakarProgram Manager| AMAKAR LLCOakland Township, Mi, United States
Before I reply with a tool recommendation, let me ask what do you want to do with the EPM tool?
For example, are your looking for initial web-based collaboration, issue and risk management? Are you looking for full project portfolio management? Do you want to publish a schedule to the web-based repository for enterprise reporting?
It helps to know what functions you want to compare. I've worked with 2 clients where they both implemented Clarity. One chose to tightly integrate their project schedule within Clarity and the other chose manual data entry for milestone level data. Pursuing both options creates multiple issues within scheduling competency.
From a solution perspective, the milestone approach could have been built in Sharepoint instead of spending license fees on Clarity.
Douglas BrownBusiness Advisor| Decision Integration LLCAlexandria, Va, United States
Clarity (ex-Niku, but some 4 years ago now) is a totally different animal from MS-Project. ProSight (now Oracle PFM) is in a differnt space again. I can't speak to the other tools.
We pretty much all know what MS-Project does, at least in the client version. It's easy to critique something that is so familiar. It is worth remembering that it is exceptionally powerful in its ability to have projects move around dynamically. The portrayal of resource loading is very helpful and flexible. Its user-customizable fields can do a lot of things, given a little creativity. Even the client version is incredibly powerful, able to handle dozens of projects in a single file if need be, and it is fast.
Clarity's primary asset is that it has a fantastic workflow engine. I don't mean a cheesy one-step thing like SharePoint or HEAT. It is VERY advanced. On the down side, the web-based structure means that it cannot show dependencies well, and in any case Clarity doesn't handle dynamic date math too well. So it is best used for very high-level views, and (despite the APIs to other PM tools) you may well find your PMs or your PFM team hand-entering data from details PM tools into Clarity. But what it does really, really well is workflow, and at higher levels of the organization that is a much, much more important capability.
ProSight is an amazing demonstration of what you can do with a flat file if you have enough processing power. Having said that, it _is_ just a flat file,(a monster spreadsheet); every project is one of the lines and all other data is in one of the columns (whether it is needed or not). This makes tables and calculations a nightmare for development and QC. Projects can be linked vertically, i.e. grouped into portfolios (and this is therefore the one kind of math that ProSight does well), but they cannot be associated sequentially (i.e. no dependency charts). So it has no real analytic capability; all it can do is group the data from the project level. The "workflow" consists of building a navigation bar with links; you click each link in turn to go to the next "step" in a manual process [note that MS-Project cannot do anything more than this either]. What ProSight can do is produce "stoplight chart"-type data for the executive-level decision boards, and simple data rollups. Saving Changes...
Irene PozdniakovDirector of Auror King City Academy for Math and English - auroratutor.com| Auror King City Academy for Math and English - auroratutor.comOntario, Canada
Thank you. The issue of side-by-side comparison of PM tools including but not ;limited to Niku 6.1x or Clarity, PlanView, Primavera, PM Office, MS Project Server, Mercury, and Pro Sight. Objective is actually a huge issue for IT industry and not only. I believe any sector would requires this even those not usually considered a big market as academic institutions and education and tutoring services providers.
I worked a lot in software development business as well as providing IT support to academic institutions and education providers and know how important to have a reliable project time and budget tracking software for these processes and how hard to find the EPM that can be really customized to academic needs. We have faced this challenge while running Math and English tutoring business in Aurora King City Ontario. At our Aurora King City Academy for Mathematics and English (www.auroratutor.com) we provide tutoring services to students grade 4 to 12, Math tutoring, English tutoring and Science tutoring as well as exam prep for students in Ontario. We also have a number of online tutoring projects that provide free and paid tutoring services. To run our projects properly we badly need a good EPM tool, so we have tried a number of tools including MS Project, Sugar CRM, LiquidPlanner, GanntProject and others. None has all the features we want, and quite often we needed to customize the software. So if the software is open source and gives us option to do so, we consider this a big plus, unless your budget allows to order custom templates and modifications for software products of such big players as Oracle, HP, and Clarity.
That is why choosing a good software tool before committing your financial and human resources to it is very important.
Of the list given in the post, many products have changed. Primavera was acquired by the Oracle in 2008 and now it is a bunch of products of which most relevant is Primavera P6 Professional Project Management.
Mercury Interactive became part of HP in 2006. Mercury Interactive legacy products were integrated and sold as part of the HP IT Management Software, also known as BTO (Business Technology Optimization).
So I would suggest that since the time the original request was posted many things has changed and many more players appeared, so we need to expand and modify the list of the products to review.
Besides, I found useful some of the online reports and side-by-side compressions of PM / EPM tools found in the Internet like these
Review of top ten PM tools http://online-project-management-review.to...ppm-review.html Best Project Management Solution - http://www.siia.net/codies/2013/finalist_detail.asp?ID=22 – review of Clarizen, Innotas, LiquidPlanner, Project Insight from Metafuse
Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management – http://provice.hu/documents/gartnermq2010final[1].pdf – an interesting review of changes in IT PPM market analysis changes. Although a bit outdated (2009-2010).
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