LiquidPlanner Makes Project Planning Fluid

One of the companies I had a chance to visit with during the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference was the team from LiquidPlanner. LiquidPlanner is an On Demand Project Management alternative to Microsoft Project with a key differentiator.

LiquidPlanner allows project teams to collaborate, manage and schedule projects in one central location.  Its feature set has all the tools you would expect from a project management suite such Gantt Charts, project scheduling and import/export into Microsoft Project.

The key differentiator in LiquidPlanner is a built in a Scheduling Engine that gives project teams a relative probability of completion of tasks and deliverables in a given time frame.

The scheduling engine is actually very intuitive and in my testing, helped make visible problems that can delay a project or deliverable date. LiquidPlanner has a schedule flow around feature that automatically adjusts project tasks when problems do occur thus helping to keep an entire project on scope. 

The feature set of LiquidPlanner is rounded out nicely with social collaboration tools that are a bit more polished compared to some of the other On Demand project management tools.

LiquidPlanner is unique in that the company is Seattle based and self funded by Charles Seybold and co-founder Jason Carlson (both Expedia veterans). Charles Seybold (who also was on the Microsoft Project team) seems to have a great handle on the business model for LiquidPlanner and it is encouraging to see startups in the Enterprise 2.0 space forecasting revenue based on actual Business to Business sales transactions versus the advertising model of social media companies.

LiquidPlanner’s commercial offering was released on June 11th at Enterprise 2.0 and is free for teams up to 3 users and priced at $35 dollar per month (or $300 for an annual plan) for teams greater than 4 users with a very generous 50gb of online file storage.

1. Godzhesas , July 7, 2008:

   LiquidPlanners main mistake is, that it doesn’t offer proper issue/task tracking, all big projects need it. The innovations that they provide look very good, but it looses when it comes down to feature comparison to, for example, http://projects.zoho.com or http://www.comindwork.com

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   Ameed Taylor reply on July 8th, 2008 :

   In what way do you mean no proper task tracking? All project management software offers task tracking as basic functionality and LiquidPlanner also adds collaborative task tracking as one of its features I noticed

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