Q: Looking for feedback from anyone who has experience with this scheduling package?  One of our subcontractors recommended it to us an alternative to MS Project/Suretrack and Primavera for small-midsize projects.  Looking for feedback on interoperability with other scheduling file formats, support, ability to run in a terminal server/Citrix environment, and general end user feedback of the application: http://www.astapowerproject.com/asta-powerproject-overview/

Thanks,

Ben Stromberg
Knutson Construction

A: We use Asta at Saunders Construction for the past 18 months. Overall, we like it.  It has replaced Suretrack, which we had been using for many years. It is more intuitive than Primavera and MS Project in my opinion, and I have been using MS Project for a number of years.

As far as interoperability, I talked to one of our schedulers who has moved data into and out of Asta from P6, MS Project , and Sure Track. You still need to double check everything, but after a couple of projects you learn how it works and future imports and exports go very smooth, with little data loss.

We do not have a Citrix environment, so I cannot speak to that.

For support, they are in England.  They are very responsive however.  Any questions I have sent via e-mail were responded to when I walked in in the morning. I can usually e-mail and get responses back until about 9:30 a.m. my time (after that they go home). And the support has been helpful. Our local re-seller has also been very helpful with support where they can.

One lesson learned. If you are using a license server and plan on checking out licenses, make sure it is physical.  They have done something to the software that makes it difficult to check/loan licenses if it is installed on VMware. This was done by design, and they seem unwilling to change it. If you are in Citrix and not checking licenses out to a PC, this should not be an issue.

We use SpecOps to push out our software to desktops, and this was one of the easier packages to setup. They store their settings in the Windows registry, so it was very easy to setup how we want Asta to look through Group Policy.

Other than that, this application has not had many issues from the IT side.

Saunders Construction, Inc.

A: I don’t have any experience with ASTA, but if you're looking for something to replace Suretrack you might want to take a look at Phoenix Project Manager (http://www.phoenixcpm.com/).  We went that rout and I can not say enough about their support team and the software.  It was just what we needed to replace Suretrack without the complexity of say P6, plus we can import our old Suretrack projects when needed.