A Review of Project2Manage

It’s fairly straightforward to set up an account with Project2Manage and the process only requires a minimal amount of information. When first creating an account, you’ll be presented with the registration screen shown in the image below. (Click any image in this article for a larger view.)

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As part of the account creation process, you will be asked to choose a site address that will be incorporated into the unique URL that will be used to access your account. Since you’ll be sharing this URL with other members of your team and possibly even clients, you may want to take a couple moments here before deciding what to choose.

Once you’ve set up the account, you’ll receive an email reminding you of your domain, username, and password. From this point, you can sign in right away and start entering the information for your first project.

The user interface for Project2Manage is very intuitive. The first time you use the application, you may have to click through several tabs to familiarize yourself with the location of all of the various tools, but after that, you shouldn’t have much trouble at all.

The project management tool supports multiple projects as well as multiple users. From the main dashboard, you can view all tasks assigned to you, no matter what project with which they’re associated, or you can bring up a list of projects and view a particular one.

The main dashboard is also the place from which you can choose to create new projects or add new users and clients. You can also enter basic information about your company and even upload your company logo to give the application a customized look and feel.

Project2Manage is ad-supported, so once you log into your account, you will see advertisements across the top header of the browser window and in the lower portion of the side navigation pane. While this may seem like a bit of an annoyance to some, I actually didn’t find the ads to be intrusive at all. All the ads that I viewed were quite tasteful – most were actually advertising other project management tools. More importantly, the ads didn’t slow down the performance of the application.

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In addition to being able to create new projects, milestones and to-do lists, you can collaborate on documents using the Spot2Jot feature. With this tool, you can either type or paste in text and allow others to comment or make changes to the document.

Project2Manage has a built in message system that works similar to a virtual bulletin board. Here, you can create and post messages assigned to any category you choose. You also have the options to associate these messages with a milestone and notify team members by email that new messages have been added. This is one of my favorite features of the application due to the ease with which it facilitates communication.

Thankfully, Project2Manage is a fairly user-friendly application that’s easy to navigate, because there’s not a whole lot of documentation on the software. There’s a basic FAQ page on the web site as well as a contact form that you can submit to request support, but that’s about it.

Since Project2Manage is free, I wasn’t really expecting a lot in this arena, but it would be nice if there were at least some type of discussion forum attached to the web site so that users could request help and share tips with one another. Again, you probably won’t need much technical assistance with the tool, but I’d still like to see just a little bit more offered in this category.

Project2Manage has a very clean, crisp interface that incorporates the Web 2.0 simple, but functional, style. Despite the lack of strong user support and documentation, you should be able to find your way around the project management tool with little to no trouble.

It’s not a solution that will work for everyone, but those who are more focused on the task management piece of project management should consider checking out the application, especially since it’s free. Even if it’s not robust enough to handle all your needs, it may be able to suffice until you find something better suited.

If you're more interested in a desktop rather than an online solution, check out these reviews of the top project management desktop applications.