If your company (or department) is looking for a groupware suite that includes tools designed for product development you will want to take a look at the open source TUTOS. TUTOS stands for The Ultimate Team Organization Software and includes enough features to keep your team/department/business organized.

System requirements

  • Web Server: Apache
  • Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Firebird
  • Server: PHP 5.1 or better
  • Additional information

Who’s it for?

TUTOS is for any small to mid-sized business that needs to organize teams or departments via a groupware suite and do so on a shoe-string budget. And because of the feature set (primarily the bug tracking tool) TUTOS is perfectly suited for departments or teams focused on software or Web development.

What problem does it solve?

TUTOS solves the problem of keeping development teams and the software they develop organized. TUTOS doesn’t stop with organizing software/Web development. TUTOS can be thought of as a standard groupware suite as well. But TUTOS doesn’t suffer from feature bloat that many groupware suites suffer from. TUTOS is lean, fast, and works as efficiently as your teams should be working.

Standout features

  • Bug tracking: Keep tabs on all of the bugs creeping into your software or Website.
  • Project repository: Keep all of your project files in one convenient location that all members of the development team can access.
  • Watchlists: Team members can keep track of changes and bugs that affect projects.
  • Mailboxes: Both IMAP and POP support.
  • Invoicing: Keep your clients up to date with invoices.
  • History tracking: Retain the history of all the changes that occur with a bug.
  • Groups and teams: Sort users by groups and teams and assign them to projects.

What’s wrong?

The biggest problem with TUTOS is the presentation. People have become accustomed to modern looking Web-based tools and TUTOS suffers from a more older-school UNIX look and feel. This doesn’t detract from the functionality of the tool, but it does make it look less than up to date. Another issue with TUTOS is the administration is not nearly as intuitive, which is compounded by very poor documentation. This combination creates a much steeper learning curve even for the administrators of a TUTOS groupware site.

Competitive products

Bottom line for business

If you are willing to work through a steep administrative learning curve, and deal with sorely lacking documentation, TUTOS is a reliable, efficient tool (once up and running) that will help your teams keep track and pace with one another. Just don’t expect too many bells and whistles or a glossy interface, because TUTOS is lean and old-school UNIX. But with the price and the features you would do well to give TUTOS a try for your development teams. To be safe, keep TUTOS away from the average user as they may not know quite what to do with it.

User rating

Have you encountered the TUTOS collaborative development suite? If so, what do you think? Rate the unit and compare the results to what other TechRepublic members think. Give your own personal review of TUTOS in the TechRepublic Community Forums or let us know if you think we left anything out in our review above.

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