The same thing happened with web sites, and wikis, and various kinds of project management software.
Wrike, a six-year-old provider of social project management software in Campbell, Calif.
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While in Japan visiting customers, I met a brilliant project leader for a Japanese engineering firm who told me about how she has eliminated project-related emails by using their project management software.
The Sakai Project is a community source software development project founded by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The second comes from the auto industry where, my interviewee told me, the balance between software and hardware engineers on any given infotainment project is now 50 software engineers to one hardware engineer.
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Change is very difficult, time-consuming and often the most expensive area of any enterprise software project.
Is managing a complex software project really that different than teaching or attending a class?
Ms Polese used to be in charge of marketing Sun Micro systems' Java software project.
Apache, a software project of the open source movement, claims the majority of the Web server market.
"When you tell them you can do an analytics project using sophisticated software, it's definitely something they pay attention to, " he said.
Funded by Marc's income from a consulting gig at Booz Allen Hamilton--and working from their parents' house--they refined Alain's project into commercial software.
These companies are either adding support services to an existing open source project or creating software and using open source as a marketing technique.
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And Zoho is already pushing into more sophisticated applications, offering customer-management and project-planning software alongside basics such as word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software.
Asana is used for a wide variety of applications, such as project management, software bug tracking, human resources application tracking or a light-weight CRM system.
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Many organizations try to earn back their return on investment in project management enterprise software by activating every function and feature a technology has to offer or by custom developing an elaborate solution.
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Last month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited Shenzhen in southern China to unveil the company's "Venus project, " software and hardware that allows VCD players and other consumer devices to display Chinese Internet content on TVs.
The search firm says that an experimental software project designed to gather data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks was accidentally rolled out along with its Street View initiative, which uses cameras mounted on cars to film streets and buildings.
The basic premise that Brooks argues against is the notion that a software project that takes one person a year to complete (twelve person-months) can have its timeline shortened to a single month simply by staffing the project with a dozen engineers.
One such project with an accounting software company used analytics to search customer feedback for signs of dissatisfaction and suggestions for improvement.
His latest project focuses on the software behind the traditionally crafted robots.
Fried is the founder of 37Signals, a Chicago firm that sells Web software for project management and collaboration under the names Basecamp and Backpack.
In reaction to this observation, Schwaber created Scrum, a method of managing the communication in a complex software development project and removing distractions that could push a project off course.
They felt so betrayed by the decision, says Walter Bender, a One Laptop founder, that they vilified the entire project and convinced other software designers not to collaborate with it.
The event, dubbed Mozilla Translathon 2012, was organized to provide translations for Firefox, Google's Endangered Languages Project, the WikiMedia software that powers Wikipedia and 500 crowdsourced articles, to boot.
This "application lifecycle management"--or ALM--approach reflects the ways in which software has entered more parts of the company over the past decade, and how non-IT managers must also take on software-project responsibilities.
This past summer, Exsteam Software completed a project with Merrill Lynch that reinvented the financial giant's customer account statement.
Released in 2005, Google Reader was begun four years earlier as a project called JavaCollect by independent software engineer Chris Wetherell.
The phone's form, on the other hand, seems to be top notch, indicating that the project was canned before the software team had a chance to catch up.
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This past summer, Exsteam Software completed a project with Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) that reinvented the financial giant's customer account statement.
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