Show HN: Ultra-portable Gantt chart tool for very regulated environments

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115 points · aerugo_ · 7 days ago

I work for government agency with a lot of security considerations. We can't install anything and using public webapps is out of the question. Going through clearance or procurement to buy or install something is a pain.

I needed a project management tool, and what we had on offer was too clunky and old. I built SimpleGantt to be ultra lightweight and portable. It's one HTML, one Javascript and one CSS file. Each project is saved into a single .yaml file.

If you have a SharePoint environment you can "host" it by uploading the repo to SharePoint after renaming simplegantt.html to simplegantt.aspx. That allows anyone with access to open the tool by simply having the URL.

Try it at: https://aerugo.github.io/simplegantt/simplegantt

This is a couple of days of tinkering, and mostly exists to keep me from going crazy while managing projects with lots of deadlines and dependencies, so don't expect much. But another person in the same position, finding this might lead to calmer days.

29 comments
greatgib · 4 days ago
Thank you very much for this project, not only because it looks nice but also to have created with a long lost spirit: "I do something nice for myself and I share it with the world" open source, and doing something straight simple with dependency!

I wish more things are released like that.

Also your tool might be very useful because there isn't a good Gantt tool that is lightweight anymore, i search for one recently and my only solution in the end was to use an excel template...

My 2 feedbacks if you are interested: - it is annoying to have the "category" required to create a task. Maybe you could create a task with an "undefined" category if none provided? - a great feature would be to be able to export the result output or view in a PNG picture or SVG.

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dijit · 4 days ago
That's really nice, such a good idea.

Over the last 15 years the browser has become more and more of an application delivery platform, and that notion has caused SaaS to run basically everything.

I realised this not too long ago, and incidentally it was due to gantt software.

We, like everyone it seems, use Jira for issue tracking, but the actual roadmapping of resources and dependencies leaves a lot to be desired, tools like Microsoft Project are not only prohibitively expensive- they also don't work on MacOS.

Similar issues can be levied at Omnigraph.

Only SaaS tools like "InstaGantt" seem to fit the bill of cross-platform, lightweight and reasonably cost effective.

Note: I'm currently not using Instagantt, despite it being the closest to good I could find, because I dislike subscriptions. :(

bsenftner · 16 hours ago
This is very nice. Is there any possibility of having an "hours" unit of time in addition to the days, weeks, months options? Lacking that, allow the unit of time to be a float, a fractional value?

I've worked in very large scale project management, to the tune of 3-8 companies working together on a single project, each with 1,200 to 2,500 people working on the project from each company, and all the tasks are managed by fractional hours per person, and then summed into working groups to accomplish the hundreds of thousands of individuals tasks over a 12 to 36 month schedule. Think animated media production.

I'd love to integrate something like simplegantt into this work. Currently it's fed managers' scheduling excel files, with no easy way to visualize the entire schedule across all participants without an external moderately lengthy process to compile all that info.

HPsquared · 4 days ago
I've had a fair bit of success making miniature "local HTML with embedded JS, no external resources" apps like this. You just have a single file that runs in the browser like an Excel macro but much more secure. You can have the JS and CSS embedded within the HTML file too, which makes it even easier.

I'd use a plain file picker for loading instead of the file system access API. That's even less security cross-section.

zekenie · 4 days ago

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