Intellisys Project Desktop X - 3.90

I've deleted my previous reviews of Project Desktop as a sort of olive-branch gesture toward greater cooperativity with Intellisys support. I hope they will respond in kind and take my recent product feedback and support requests with more receptivity, and with more responsiveness. Those earlier reviews point out some rather serious shortcomings of Project Desktop, but I've withdrawn them initiatively and voluntarily in the hope that Intellisys will make a genuine good-faith effort to be honestly responsive rather than defensive.

In the meantime, anyone reading this who might be looking for a serious project management app for OS X should be forewarned: Do NOT buy a Project Desktop license before you have done the following:

• Used the application in demo mode with your full project data base loaded, and you have actually tried using it to do some real work
• Fully tested its printing and reporting features, and tested its interoperability with other Mac OS X applications...like Microsoft Excel
• Checked its resource leveling on a day-by-day basis to ensure that you understand how it actually functions in real-world conditions — that is, how it manipulates the project schedule, and whether it actually schedules the work according to the constraints and parameters you apply to the scheduling process
• Tested its user interface in context with your expectations of what a Mac OS X application should be able to do, and where its commands should be located in the menu structure. For example, you would not only expect to find the "Save" command under the File menu, but you would actually expect there to be a "Save" command (there isn't)
• Evaluated for yourself its intuitiveness, ease of use, length of learning curve, and generally how closely it conforms to the Mac OS X GUI
• Used the help system to solve some real lookup queries that actually answer your questions.

I'm not saying that Project Desktop will fail those tests for your specific needs in a project management application. Rather, I'm saying that until you have performed them and determined its functionality in those areas for yourself (not just accepted Intellisys's marketing rhetoric at face value), you won't really know how the application will perform for you.

I hope that Intellisys will indeed be responsive to my recent feedback and support requests. I hope that I will not need to re-post my earlier reviews, which provided detailed listings of Project Desktop's current shortcomings. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to find that Intellisys is serious about supporting its users.

If that's the case, then the company deserves every chance to diligently work toward resolving those shortcomings without the stigma of negative reviews. I'll work with anyone who is willing to demonstrate a good-faith effort to work with me. But I want to see that effort reflected in results, not in unsubstantiated claims of product features and functionality that, in fact, do not exist — features that are so badly broken that they render the company's claims about the software's capabilities, essentially, false advertising. I want to see genuine support that justifies the substantial cost of the perpetual license fee I paid in good faith. (The $159 cost shown on this page covers only the cost of a one-year license.)

I paid for software that I expected to work as it was represented to work. I did not pay for that software with the expectation that it would not work, or with the expectation that my reports of substantial bugs in the software's functionality would be met with dismissal, and vague assertions that those bugs would be fixed in some future release.

These are all matters of fact, not opinion. It is now up to Intellisys to determine which facts will determine the qualities that characterize their product's value to this user's continuing experience. It is up to Intellisys to determine what I report here as to their responsiveness to legitimate complaints about their product's ability to perform as they represented it.

I've been looking for an MS Project replacement for Mac since MS stopped selling their version. This is not it! Java app, x-platform Mac/Win/Nix. It's an example of how clunky a Java app can be -- slow, clunky, awful UI. Toolbars messy, fonts on column heads too big, general sloppiness and ugliness if you're a seasoned Mac user (although the Gantt scaling slider is a good idea). General navigability is frustrating - you can't simply enter data & tab around like MS Project. Import from MS Project did not work for me. MS Projecy hasn't had any significant features added for years (project management is, after all, well defined)...why the lack of a good program for Mac, I don't know. If anyone knows of one, please let me know!!