Netherlands-based Startup Tom’s Planner is launching their dead-simple web-based project management and planning system lets users create and visualize an online planning schedule. The application is meant to be used by a broad spectrum of consumers, from project managers, event and wedding planners to busy soccer moms or personal assistants.
Tom’s Planner lets you create color-coded project plans and schedules, share them anyone in a team or groups, embed project schedules, and export to Microsoft Project. To help users get started, Tom’s Planner provides project planning templates for website designers, construction projects, event and wedding planners, vacation home rentals and personnel schedules. And users can save their projects to their hard drives instead of storing the file in the cloud.
The startup faces competition from Microsoft Project, LiquidPlanner, Primavera, and others. But the beauty of the application is that it’s simple to use, even for those users who aren’t particularly tech-savvy. And it’s free (for now). Tom’s Planner is offering a free, one-year account to all new users who sign up for the public beta launch by December 31.
NICE product; but I think you can manage almost all the tasks mentioned in here through Google Calendar and maybe with websites like rememberthemilk.com as well
NICE comment; but I disagree.
I wouldn’t necessarily want my client meetings being in the same calendar as my project resource allocation. Independently, yes, I am sure you can put projects in GCal, however, it doesn’t work for everyone. Especially larger organizations where meetings and projects run in parallel day-to-day.
What would be nice is a pipeline manager.
This is just Gantt Chartastic! Exactly what I was looking for. Signed up.
I think the application would have been more appealing if it also manages the prodution and test enviroment pipelining and also have a built in efficiancy calculating algorithm.
Wow, looks pretty awesome for a one man’s job. Any idea in which IDE/language it’s written?
“And users can save their projects to their hard drives instead of storing the file in the cloud.”
What the **** is up with the cloud bullshit? Store it in the cloud? Do you have any technical understanding? Why don’t you just say it like it is: “[...] instead of storing the file on the server”. Is that really so hard?
I’m so sick of that cloud hype.
It’s called a *journalist metaphor* that is also a pretty good technical description of a service that may not reside on a single server. If, for instance, this company relies on something like AWS or EC2 then the file is not stored on ‘the’ server or even ‘a’ server it’s stored on a cloud.
Glad to clear that up for you.
Advisor, your point is good but your tone is offputting.
@TCCritic The interface is written entirely in Javascript. Almost everything is written from scratch to ensure proper performance. A lot of fun to do.
signed up for the free beta but never got the confirmation email that it said was sent
Google should acquire this company and integrate this into Google Calendar. It would be A-MA-ZING!
James you couldn’t be more on target with that one. I feel that Google could do so much more with Google Calendar.
@charles Did you get your email? I checked all the servers and the registration process is working just fine. The number of users is rising rapidly by the minute!
If you don’t receive the mail just re-register or you can send me an email at tom@tomsplanner.com.
@James Mowery I couldn’t agree more
Umm, so after playing around with it, there’s no way to actually *save* in the cloud, I have to download a .txt file? Having a single file in a folder on a machine is what I want to get away from!
Sure, I could put it in my dropbox, but then I have to muck around and upload it on each different computer that I want to work on it from. To have to handle a bunch of .txts seems bizarre in this day and age.
No never got it just checked
tried the reapply says I am already in the system and can not use the same email account
I work on a few mid-scale (5-10 person team) web products and this looked perfect for our simple timeline management. My fellow project manager even went so far as to setup our own little timeline and project group….
Then he tried to share it with me so I could edit it and change a developer’s task, and it all fell apart.
He was able to share a beautiful read-only version, but any collaboration whatsoever is impossible. For now we would have to save it to a shared folder on our network, and hit open each time we want to mess with the project.
Tom why you gotta make this so hard :\
It doesn’t include collaboration yet. I am still working on that. One step at a time.
However the way you save your work in a file on your own hard disk is how it always is going to work.
I found that a lot of companies still are not ready to store their data in the cloud (external servers) for security reasons. So by enabling users to save their work on your own hard drive this problem is solved.
So it has the best of two worlds. No installation or maintenance and always the latest version and you do keep the data within your own security zone.
Tom, I have to respectfully disagree here, I think you’ve almost gone for the worst of both worlds!
I work in a small start-up like consultancy and we would have little problem with keeping our project schedule in the cloud as long as reasonable security was assured. Project outlines aren’t as secret as the actual project work itself, if you see what I mean.
On the other hand, the .txt implementation and lack of an offline client means that usability suffers immensly – there is no way to click a file and open it automatically, you still have to be online to edit the files, and every time I want to open the file I have to reupload the file!
I see what you are trying to do here, but a hosted *option* would make my company much more likely to pay for a license.
Working on the signing up problem! I have trouble with sending the automated confirmation email. If you have subscribed, your email will have been added to the database and the confirmation will be send to you as fast as possible.
No price listed. Not signing up for a sticker shock a year from now when all my schedule is on your product.
I think that’s a bit unfair to Tom – it’s hardly likely to be unreasonably priced – competitors are around the $20 a month mark. There is also the option to export to MS Project .XML format, so you can always free your data.
Also, you get a *free* year if you sign up now, which is pretty generous in my book!
Completely agree, how can anyone complain about a year of free use
@Ankush – Unfair to Tom indeed. This what he states on his website as well:
“We’ll continue to improve the application. Eventually Tom’s Planner will become a paid service. Personal accounts will likely remain free (one schedule only) and we’ll charge a small, reasonable annual fee per user for corporate accounts (unlimited number of schedules).”
Keep up the good work Tom.
Thanks for the support.
I want to be sure it all works perfect before charging anybody anything. I see no better way than a free beta version.
You will always be able to export them to MS-Project. I promise you that.
Hey guys, Shimon here. Great idea Tom, there have never been any good Gant charting programs cause we all know MS Project is no good. All my corporate bosses ever ask for is Gant timeline charts, even when I was a banker we called them ‘football fields’ in the valuation games we played. But it is way toooo hard to make Gant in excel, even though I easily can with a little program I made. Anyway, best of luck to Tom, this is wonderful, even though the UI could use a little non Microsoft feel, hehe.
Ok the sign up problem is fixed and running smoothly for more than an hour now.
It really looks very neat, but it definitely needs much more in order to successfully manage even small projects. And as i understand those features are on the way, so good luck to Tom!
Great work. I really like the intuitive interface. And look forward for the more collaborative version!