Crossposted from dogstar.org Nonprofits and Web 2.0 -There are some screenshots there.
I started writing about dotProject on the 28th of October. I've set up a small demo project on my localhost to demonstrate how the tool can be used to manage a project.
Any given ticket can have any number of workers assigning time to it. Each of those logs can be assigned a different cost code. That means you can track different charge levels based on the person doing the work on a single ticket.
You can set up an expected number of hours of effort on a given ticket, but the person doing the work can change the percentage of work completed on the ticket as well. That is to say, the time on a ticket doesn't necessarily match the percentage completed. This flows through to the Project View.The Project View gives you a list of the tickets in the project. This list gives you the start and finish date for a ticket. If the ticket isn't complete and you've gone beyond the end date, the ticket is flagged red. The expected duration is listed, but you need to drill down to the ticket detail if you want to see the full number of hours booked to that ticket.
A click of a mouse brings you to a Gantt chart of the project with two views. The first is the current month, the second is the full project.The chart will show you ticket dependencies if you've set them up.
The Task Log tab allows you to see the hours booked by one user or by all users with a total listed at the bottom. You can list tasks by cost code, allowing you to quickly identify how much time/money has been burned over a given time period.
dotProject makes it easy to see where you are in a project and where you've been and what is left to complete the project.