Reporting and charts were, of course, good-looking. But they were also quite functional--we especially like the bubble chart, a handy tool for plotting three or more data points in one graph. All charts are configurable, and let you drill down all the way to the individual task level. This is true of all the products we tested; the differences between the solutions lie in how they generate charts and reports rather than their capabilities.
Changepoint PM's deployment model, like that of Artemis 7, requires a SQL Server or Oracle database as its repository. Unlike Pacific Edge, Changepoint relies only partially on Microsoft's .Net framework. Its administrative console is completely .Net-based, while its user interface is based on both ASP and .Net. Changepoint is in the process of migrating its architecture completely to .Net, but is taking its time in doing so.
Changepoint 8. Changepoint Corp., (800) 263-7189, (905) 886-7000. www.changepoint.com
With Artemis 7, we learned quickly that NWC Inc. had overallocated developers and figured out how delaying a project would affect the IT department's capacity. Outstanding visual representation of a project's cost and resources within a time period helped us draw the first conclusion; unique what-if scenario generation clued us in to the second.
Artemis 7's cost and resource-capacity capabilities beat the competition. After we entered all of NWC Inc.'s requested projects, Artemis 7 summed up the network engineer, developer and system admin labor hours necessary for every project scheduled, and we compared those figures to the number of labor hours available for those resources for 2004. Using a graphic visualization, the product showed that the number of hours scheduled for all resources was more than the available labor hours.
Armed with this knowledge, we set out to solve the problem, which Artemis handled deftly. The software showed the impact of each project on our resource capacity and how adding or removing each project would affect overall capacity. We could even drag a single project's resource allocation in time to see what effect a delay might have on capacity. Neither PM nor Portfolio Edge let us create this what-if scenario and use it so effectively.
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