Niku’s open-source tool a work in progress

Niku Corp., one of the major manufacturers of industrial-strength portfolio and project management software, announced in July that it was making its Workbench project scheduling tool available for free through the open-source development community.The company promised to soon make the code available at the open-source development site, SourceForge.net, which in theory should enrich and maintain the software.I briefly tried the resulting product, Open Workbench, available at .Niku also says Open Workbench will become the only version of Workbench. All this adds up to a calculated effort to break the Microsoft monopoly and give Niku customers—but few others—an alternative for their basic project scheduling.I found version 1.0 barely usable, and not much like Microsoft Project, though I can see strong similarities in basic data-entry and charting. For now, Open Workbench is an interesting novelty that won’t begin to be useful until the fall upgrade, and until developers get their hands on it.