AceProject’s designers must be confident in their product’s ability to seduce visitors: they require no registration to try out the demo. People can play around with the system and determine whether it fits their need without having to leave their email address behind.

Moreover, should one decide to go further in the purchasing process, a free, full-featured account is available! This account has a limited number of users and projects, but otherwise offers the same functions as the subscription or the source code packages. This free solution can even be used on a long-term basis for small teams, since the free accounts do not expire. This is again evidence that AceProject’s design team has tremendous confidence in their product.

Once the account is created, AceProject Support kindly sends a welcome email that contains important facts and connection information. Account creation is further simplified by a pop-up tutorial that guides the user through creating projects, tasks, users and setting up AceProject. This project management solution has taken support to the feature level: every single item and page in the system comes with a help file. There is also extensive information on the more complex concepts, such as access rights, which make sure that anyone can understand AceProject quickly and easily.

AceProject itself has a very clean, white-and-blue interface. Being tab-based reduces greatly the amount of clicking and searching (and frustration) a typical user will go through when they get acquainted to the system. The menus are simple, the pages load quickly and one can switch between French and English in the blink of an eye.

But AceProject is more than a friendly interface with extensive online help: it is an effective, powerful project management system that provides a solution for those who seek more than task management but don’t want to get lost in complex and costly systems.

The simple system of projects, tasks, and users is very user-friendly: projects and users are created, then users are assigned to projects and the project’s tasks are assigned to users. Each organization can have multiple projects going on at the same time, a feature that is relatively scarce in the project-management world. In fact, user and project limitations are defined by the license or subscription purchased.

Tasks are well organized. They can have attachments, whose size limitations depend on the license or subscription, they can be assigned to multiple users. Moreover, tasks can contain an unlimited amount of text, which keeps their history right there.

From tasks and projects stored in AceProject, a plethora of statistics and reports can be produced, adapted to the business leader, the project manager and the user. AceProject contains a section for administrators that holds statistics and reports for all projects at once: workload, user activity and the global completion status of the projects. More reports are available for a more in-depth look at project completion. Project statistics provide a summary for each project in a convenient one-page format. The 6 task reports inform the project manager on a specific aspect of the project's tasks, giving all the details needed to follow its evolution. Finally, each user can know what has to be done upon login with the My Task page, which shows all tasks assigned to the logged in user, making it easy to stay informed.

We liked the highly visual Gantt charts that are available for each project or the whole account. They instantly show the completion of the project and its timeline over the following weeks or months. For a more detailed view of the deadlines, a monthly calendar displays each task’s start and end dates.

AceProject’s designers incorporated very original features in the time logging module. First of them is the IN/OUT module. This convenient timer is associated to tasks and automatically fills out the user’s time sheet for them, eliminating accuracy and over-billing issues. Furthermore, time sheets can also be filled out manually. However, the kicker in this module is that how a user fills out his or her time sheets is decided through access rights and can include one of the methods or both methods. We really appreciated the flexibility in this system.

Another neat feature is the discussion forum. Each project has a space where discussion threads are available to all project members to discuss issues freely. This practical feature permits expressing ideas without having to associate everything to a task.

Access rights are detailed and permit adapting each user’s permissions to their needs. Extensive information on access rights is available right from the web site, making it easy to understand the first time.

AceProject’s email notification is set individually. Users can receive an email when they are assigned a new task, when their tasks are modified, when their time sheets are processed and when they receive a message.

The message center works just like email: a message can be sent to one user, a project team or all account users. This is great both for basic communication and announcements. It also has the benefit of saving space on a business’ email servers.

User preferences were also well thought-out: each user can set how AceProject works for them and update their personal information, and empowering feature for the users.

When ready to purchase an account, AceProject offers uncommon pricing options that adapt to the scale and security needs of any organization. Unique to AceProject, both online and source code packages are available. Hence, a company can pay a monthly fee to use AceProject on their web server, or buy the source code and install the system on their corporate Intranet. This provides security-focused businesses extra control on safeguarding their data.

Overall, AceProject is truly a solution: it offers a complete and convenient package for big and small project teams alike.

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