Redmine

Redmine is a freely available and web-based project management( collaboration) tool. Redmine is based on Ruby on Rails - a framework specifically for the creation of web applications. With its functions such as project planning or error and change management, Redmine offers an alternative to established project management tools such as Microsoft Project.

Redmine is currently available in version 0.8.4. Since August 2009 a software for the AppleiPhone and iPod Touch is provided, which realizes mobile access to Redmine projects. Since Redmine is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License( GPL), its use for commercial purposes is also possible, and the source code may also be adapted for own purposes.

The core of Redmine

The so-called ticket management is the core of Redmine. Tickets are understood as errors and change requests as well as new functions or simply the definition of activities to be performed. Redmine offers comfortable operating functions for the recording, processing and tracking of these tickets. Here, for example, an e-mail function is integrated, which automatically informs the creators of tickets when they are processed by other people. A very good integration of the also freely available version control system Subversion is given in Redmine. One of the useful functions here is the assignment of tickets to individual revision changes (change sets) in the Subversion repository. There is also a Wiki for project-internal documentation. In addition, Redmine offers planning and evaluation functions such as Gantt charts, time monitoringand calendar functions, Subversion (SVN) browser, management of documents, user and project management as well as support for many common databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLServer, SQLite. If you want to use all the functions, you also need an SMTP server and a Subversion server. Since the tool is also multilingual, it is also suitable for globally distributed teams.

Redmine as web-based project management

Redmine runs on a web server and is a web-based project management solution based on the Ruby on Rails web framework. Therefore also its design principle "Convention over Configuration" is realized. This saves on the one hand an otherwise quite complex configuration of Redmine, but accepts for example that certain naming conventions must be observed.

For a simple installation a so-called Bit-Nami-Stack with the complete Redmine installation is available under the link below. Besides Redmine, this installer contains all necessary dependencies, such as Ruby, Ruby on Rails and the MySQL database. The stack is available for all common operating systems.