Float

Avantages

Float's user interface and logic are inspirational. They have made the activity of coordinating multiple resources on multiple projects about as easy as it can be. They have paid a lot of attention to usability, efficient use of screen real estate and simple navigation. However the killer feature is the intuitive yet clever way that searching and data navigation work. All searching and filtering is done using a single search field, which offers indexed word search on pretty much everything including tags. There is also a well-worked out protocol for handling union and intersect searches.

Inconvénients

The only real bugbear is that any user that can enter data into the system can define new values for any field. It isn't possible to centrally control lists such as task names, clients, job descriptions etc. This means that if you have more than one person using the system, very quickly you get different versions of the same thing being defined (e.g. job roles being slightly different) which makes it difficult to analyse across records. Not a dealbreaker, but I do think it should be possible to lock down lists of values. Also it would be good if you could zoom out the view a little more - if you're dealing with more than a dozen resources/projects.

Avantages

I like the ease of use for bandwidth calculation. Before Float, it would be very difficult for us to understand Trainer occupancy, and it was also a challenge to schedule trainings far in advance over several regions. With Float, I can see what's coming up at a glance and provide accurate reports to stakeholders so that they know how busy we are and will be. At the end of the quarter, I can easily calculate and show how much time we spent, and on what.

Inconvénients

For my specific use, access can be a challenge. I need something between "Project Manager" and "Member." For me, it would be ideal if there are a "Department Manager" role where people who had this level of access could modify the schedule for anyone in their department, but not see or edit the schedule of other departments.

Avantages

The user-friendliness. It doesn't try and be too over complicated.

Inconvénients

only downside is that I'm unable to brand it up a bit with our company logo's/colours. Not a biggy though, more of a nice to have.

Avantages

There aren't may softwares that let you schedule a team in such an easy and organised way.
I think most softwares nowadays are too complex and make you spend more time organising tasks than actually working on them.
Float is so clear and simple you can actually use it to manage big projects without spending too much time on it.

Inconvénients

It's getting better, but it would be very useful if we could:

- Right click on a pencil and be able to copy it over into a different person.
- Book more than one person on the same project (for example if two workers are on the same project because one of them is doing a training but you don't want to charge twice for that time).
- Lately when I try to schedule more than 1 project in one day on the same person I get a message saying I can't schedule anyone for more than 24 hours) even if I'm not exceeding the 8 normal working hours. It'd be great if that could be fixed.
- It'd be good if milestones were more visible.
- I think reports should be a bit less complicated and more visual.
- It'd be really helpful if you could group projects up in folders when you go to the Projects tab as at the moment we have like... 45 different projects going on and although we color code them it's difficult to organise all of them.
-I'd like to have more than only three types of view when looking at our schedules a part from 'Days, 'Weeks' and 'Months'.
It'd be great if you could 'Archive' users as well as projects. So when a worker it's not working at the company anymore and you don't want to pay for it on Float you can kind of 'Archive' him (so you are not able to book him on anything but still you can see him on the boards so you don't loose what it's been scheduled on him.)

Avantages

I really like the possibility of having a global view of the activities and the possibility of having a fast (very fast) synchronization with the Outlook calendar. Furthermore, it is really useful to assign different roles to people in order to define planning permissions.

Inconvénients

I am not crazy about the graphic style of the calendar / schedule view. Hiding over the weekend it is difficult to see at a glance the separation between the various weeks. Also there is no translation of the portal in Italian, not a serious deficiency, but if there were it would be better :)

It also lacks the ability to view your schedule in a daily agenda format in order to have a more precise schedule of your commitments, as you can do through outlook.