SharedPlan Pro

I have my own small IT company and have been using Network Diagram Software for a while now. The program is comprehensive and reliable. I would recommend anyone in this field to try it out and see how easy it is to use.

We've been using SharedPlan tools (Pro and Central) for over a year now and when I read the review below I just had to respond. Basically, as opposed to finding the UI to be a mess we really like the simplicity and the fact that the UIs are not cluttered up with a bunch of cruft we never use. Further, we are a mixed shop - some of us use Macs, others Windows - with SharedPlan both are available and completely interoperable. We haven't encountered any of the issues the gentleman below describes as far as features not working and when we have bumped into problems the folks at SharedPlan have responded promptly and effectively. Overall, we are really please with the software and the benefits we derive from it. And, on top of it all, it's only $99! At that price we can afford to give it to everyone.

On paper, Shared Plan looked good, full feature set, web sharing, offline working, report generation etc and not too expensive. But after one day of trying to get a basic outline of a project up and running, I gave up. The reason: the user interface is terrible. I should have been forewarned by the awful, old-fashioned graphic design of the web site and the look of the software, but I was not prepared for the UI mess that is Shared Plan. I'd watched the intro videos and it seemed pretty straightforward, but what you don't get from the video is what you have actually to do. Each text change has to be confirmed by the return key - you can't simply enter text and tab to the next field. You can't customise or change item IDs, they're numbered in the order you entered them, making them worthless. The visual plan - in the desktop app - is pointlessly modal (“tasks mode” and “insert tasks mode”) and it's not very clear which mode you are in - until you start inadvertently creating new tasks with every click of the mouse. Dragging rows in the Gantt chart did not change the order of rows on screen, but actually had done so when I reopened the file. Visual feedback for most interaction is poor to the point that you're never really sure what's happened - the list goes on. Suffice it say, in the age of iPhones and Google apps you expect much better. There seems to be very little choice for people and businesses looking for good, simple, affordable project management software for the Mac, yet I could not possibly recommend Share Plan as it currently stands (V5.4.7), even if it was free.

We've recently released Pro 4 and you'll find a number of enhancements and improvements. Beyond the Mac desktop we've also made significant improvements in the network infrastructure to our hosted project server (something you won't find anywhere else). If you've downloaded the trial software in the past you might want to do so again as Pro 4 will give you another free trial period.

I purchased a copy of SharedPlan Pro and have been delighted with it. It has a strong set of core features that I use and very few features that I don't use. It's not long on eye-candy just very functional. I recommend it and encourage you to give it a try. If you do run in to problems they have excellent support also.

Check out iTaskX as it blows this away.