Planbox is a project management software solution founded on scrum and agile software development, now adapted for any project management.  Planbox started in October of 2009, but really became a commercial tool in May of 2011.  The company is based out of Montreal, Canada under the leadership of Olivier Cabanes, with servers in Austin, Texas.  DreamSimplicity took a tour of the Planbox solution and here are some of the unique features and highlights.

Because Planbox was built for scrum and agile software development, the terminology and user interface throughout the solution mirrors this system.  But don't let that stop you if you are not a software developer, the scrum and agile system is a simple, efficient way to manage any project.

Check out the Planbox dashboard.  On the left you will see a list of Initiatives.  Initiatives can be clients/customers or a group of projects. You can upload their logo for easy recognition.  In other project management solutions, clients/customers are created at the project level.  Having a higher level for initiatives makes it easier to isolate all projects for one client, instead of having a bunch of projects with the same client name on them.

In each Initiative, you can create Projects and each project has a wide variety of Items you can assign to it.  Items are what most people call tasks.  See the drop down menu below on the right.  That's a detailed list of Item types.  If the Item is working on a problem that came up, you might use the "Bug" Item.  Or if you need to get payment from a client, maybe the "Accounting" Item.  The icon shows up on the left of the Item in your Project window, seen on the left.  It is beneficial to use these Item types because Planbox has a robust reporting feature that will show you how much of your time is being spent in each area.

Planbox has all the good stuff you expect to find in a project management solution, like task status, a place for comments and to upload files.  A cool feature is their Iteration set up.  An Iteration is a set period of time that you can define.  For example, if you meet with your staff once a week to go over company projects, you would set the Iteration to 7 days.  Then your to do lists will be organized by this time period.  Clicking on the Current tab will show you what you need to do for this week, Next tab would then be next week, and Last is where all the completed work from previous weeks is stored for easy review.  Backlog is where tasks that don't have a schedule yet are stored.

Not only can you sort Items by Iteration, but you can label each Item just like tagging a video or tweet, so you can easily search for all Items pertaining to that label.

Some other awesome features, Planbox lets you decide what features you want by easily selecting or deselecting them, making the platform flexible for all users.  Also, they have AUTOSAVE!  No more headaches on lost work.

When you check out Planbox, we recommend doing a walk through with an Account Manager.  We signed up for the free trial for this article and found that it was easier to get a complete picture with the demonstration.

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