If you've been following the GoPlan Blog for the past few months, you'll know they've been able to generate quite some buzz with an invitation only release a few months back. Well, GoPlan is now available to the masses - I signed up for the free account last night. It is impressive and kudos to the guys at WeBreakStuff.com for producing a nice app!

If you don't know, GoPlan is an online project management suite with some nice collaboration features built in. From the GoPlan blog...

Goplan is an online project management solution. It allows teams and individuals to collaborate through tasks, file management, real-time chat, online calendaring, and many other features.

Ok, I created my account and I logged in and was immediately infatuated with the eye candy. GoPlan looks great. It's got an intuitive layout, pretty icons and a soothing color scheme - maybe a bit like Blinksale . Now I realize look and feel is very subjective. 37 Signals and their Basecamp product have the whole "simple is genious" thing going on and that's fine. But frankly, I'm a bit shallow. When I'm using an app for an hour or more, I want it to be pretty. Ok, enough said about that.

So yeah, I wanna be GoPlan - I want CreativePro Office to be just as pretty and just as simple to use. But playing with GoPlan for awhile brought me back to just why I built CPO in the first place. For example, GoPlan has no invoicing feature - yet. It has no expense tracking feature - yet. It has no timesheet feature - yet. I say 'yet' because GoPlan is very much in an early release stage and the team may add these features later. Or they may stick with the core feature set they have now and that's great and it will work stunningly for a lot of users.

But my vision for CPO has always been a complete end-to-end solution for the single developer or very small (2-5 people) development team or the single developer with 2 or 3 subcontractors, etc. By end-to-end I mean from drafting an estimate to sending the invoices - every stage of the project life-cycle is handled by one app. Back in the day, I used to get really tired of creating estimates and quote in a Word template, then tracking my hours online, using Outlook as my default task manager (you know what I mean), and then creating invoices with an Excel file. Things are much better these days and apps like GoPlan do a lot of the heavy lifting. But I still need to access 3 or more apps to get everything done.

For now, I'm sticking with the end-to-end approach with CreativePro Office and we'll see how it works out. Maybe it's just too darn complicated to pull off well.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff