Schedule a project & track tasks

Platform : Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista

Type: freeware

Manufacturer: TaskCoach

Size: 9MB

Rating: 3

Verdict: Promising tool that will enable you to schedule a project, track tasks, monitor the costs involved and, as a bonus, is cross-platform.

System Requirements:

How many of us start a new project but do not bother to write down the tasks required to reach completion? If you’re a project leader, managing a development team, it’s best to have a solution that enables you to assign tasks to the other users, schedule deadlines and even manage the cost aspect of each task. For instance, if you require graphic work for your project, you won’t want someone managing this task to spend twice as much as you’ve assigned.

Unless you know how to work with Gantt charts and can understand an advanced project management tool such as Microsoft Project, tracking your tasks may present more problems than they solve (ie. you’ll spend too long trying to understand your project management tool). The solution is something far more simplistic.

One solution is Task Coach, which is a single-person solution for managing a project, or a set of projects. You can assign tasks, users, time schedules and costs involved with completing a project. At this stage, it’s a single-person task manager, which means that you can’t share the task information with other users. Hopefully that will change in the future – the developer has stated he intends to migrate the tool so you can share the info with other users, using iCalendar standard, which means you will be able to share the information through the Internet.

Now, if only the Task Coach developer takes note of something like Evernote that is a cross-platform note and information sharing tool that enables you to sync information across your installed editions, whatever the OS.

Note that Task Coach is available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and other operating systems, although the download here is for the Windows version.