I’ve now set up ActiveCollab on my server, so if you want to give it a try, the details are as follows:

URL : http://waah.co.uk/activecollab

Admin user: Admin

Ordinary user: Normal

Password (for both accounts): gizbuzz

If you want to set up any ordinary accounts yourself for testing, you can do that through the admin page. All I ask is that you don’t change the password of the admin account.

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I’ve had a quick look and it does seem to be powerful and surprisingly stable given it’s alpha release. The installation was an absolute breeze, even easier than Wordpress, and the app itself contains many great features, including:

• tagging
• assigning of tasks
• private/client areas
• people search
• multiple projects
• document upload and management

If I were 37signals I’d be very worried about ActiveCollab.

However, there are a couple of problems which need to be ironed out. Firstly, it seems unable to send mail. My server is completely able to send mail, and Wordpress (and other programs I install) manage it perfectly. This is therefore likely to be a bug, although it cannot be very difficult to fix given the fact that there have already been many successful open source implementations which ActiveCollab will be able to borrow code from.

The second problem is the awful spelling. It is so bad that the author cannot be a native English speaker. Whilst this is entirely acceptable in an alpha release, and very low down in the priorities (rightly so), it is something which will ned to be sorted out if it is to become a serious contender to Basecamp, which otherwise I fully expect it will.