It had to happen sooner or later… although Microsoft Project has 70+% of the market, someone had to make a Java-based version of MS Project. Well Marc O’Brien, who has had about 20 years in the project management space, and is now the CEO of Projity (Foster City) has not only done a completley new Project Management (PM) tool in Java, but has taken it a step further.

If you are familiar with the offerings from MS Project, the Standard version has fewer features and it is generally the MS Project Professional that is used a lot. Called “Project-On-Demand (POD)” this new tool will initially be offered in October as a service with a starting price tentatively set at only $39.99/month/user. Wisley, O’Brien is focused on SMBs and not the Fortune 1000, which is a better market for hosted tools anyway.

Underneath the covers POD uses Postgres, but is DB independent, as well as browser independent (just have to have a JVM running), and the demo we had was in Firefox.

Marc has known me for a long time, since back in the days when he was CEO of WebProject (which got sold about 5 years ago), and know’s of my interest in how teams can use this type of PM tool (what we call DPM – distributed project management) tools. He has promised that there will be additional collaborative functionality added to this tool by year end, so stay tuned!

In the mean time POD had very impressive PM functionality and could even do WBS (work breakdown structures) and RBS (resource breakdown structures), which MS Project can’t do directly at this point (you have to go into Visio to do this). POD can even do sophisticated earned value analysis (Cost Performance Index, and Schedule performance Index) as well as the basic functions of importing and exporting MS Project files without inserting additional errors.

In the spirit of “he who has the most connections wins!” POD, with its open architecture, is integrating with a number of On-Demand solutions, and through XML are integrating with a number or ERP vendors like Intacct. But the overall philosophy and goals for development were: to make a replacement for MS Project that ran in Java; was Hosted (monthly subscription model); was available on every OS/browser; decreased some of the complexity inherent in MS Project; and was inexpensive enough so that it was a “no brainer” to try and quickly buy such an application.

Marc and his company have been in stealth mode for the last 2.5 years with teams in France and India helping to develop the prodigious functionality of the product, which should be familiar enough to anyone who has used MS Project. So familiar in fact, that no cross training is needed. Marc claims that it just takes an hour to get it up and running and most of that time is a project manager or administrator creating groups and permissions. It is worth checking out if your company is not already indentured to Microsoft at: www.projity.com, although the web site does not say all that much, more will be revealed in the next few weeks.

What do you think about a Java-based alternative to MS Project?