If you’ve ever been sent a Microsoft Project file (MPP) and tried to find a way to view it without a licensed copy of MS Project, you’ve almost certainly run into a brick wall. Opening an MPP file without handing money over to Microsoft is next to impossible. Fortunately there’s an open source alternative that will not only enable you to view MS Project files, but also works as a fully featured project management application that’s just as capable as its commercial counterpart: OpenProj. In fact, OpenProj is so good that it’s distributed as part of the Star Office suite of open source office applications.
OpenProj includes a range of project management features such as: Earned Value costing, Gantt charts, Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS) charts, PERT graphs, task usage reports and work Breakdown Structure (WBS) charts. There are a number of open source MS Project replacements available, but we think OpenProj is the best.
OpenProj is available for Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows platforms and can be freely downloaded from the project web page:
June 17th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Open Workbench is another good open source replacement for MS Project: http://www.openworkbench.org/