ActiveCollab: A great tool for managing your group's projects in a web-based environment

Our research group has been using ActiveCollab, a web-based project management system, for the last year to keep all of our projects and teams organized. We have found it quite useful, because most of our team projects involve multiple organizations and people from all over the globe. We can all stay on the same page when we log into ActiveCollab and view the latest messages, milestones, tasks and files related to a specific project. Everything stays in one place and all members for the project can access it at any time!

ActiveCollab has eliminated losing messages in email inboxes, sending around various file versions in email, and not knowing who is responsible for completing what task. All these things are clearly outlined for each project and help immensley when it comes to organizing your team and increasing efficiency.

Take a look at these demos for using the system, both as a regular user and as an administrator.

This program is open-source which means you can take the source code and implement it for your team at NO COST!

Regular User

Tutorial for using Project Management system. Click on google video icon to enlarge the screen.

Administrator

Grant Submission Manager- How we organize our grant submissions using DSRC

Submitting a grant can be a confusing and frustrating process for both researchers and grant administrators at your institution. In an effort to facilitate this process for all parties involved in the submission of a grant, we created DSRC (Duke Surgery Research Central).

DSRC acts as a project manager for each grant that is submitted. This web-based software acts as a communicator between the grant office and the researcher and sets up specific tasks with deadlines and detailed instructions for the submission of any type of grant.

The general work flow looks like this:

1) Researcher logs in to the site and requests to start a new submission
2) Researcher fills out template with information about the grant
3) Grant office receives notification of the submission and creates a list of tasks for the researcher to fulfill in order to submit the grant
4) Researcher receives a list of tasks and deadlines to fulfill, these tasks include forms and templates to submit for completion
5) Grant office receives information from researcher and directs it to the appropriate offices within the institution for approvals
6) Grant information is then compiled and submitted to funding organization by grant office

If this looks like something that can help your institution, let us know, we can help you set up the system!

Watch a demo of DSRC