Review

Tenrox PSA
By Mario Morejon, COMDEX FALL 2000

• Provides a thorough project management solution
• Tracks costs, revenue and budgets
• Complete project accounting solutions by tracking timesheets, project and individual expenses, invoices and reports

Tenrox PSA is an emerging class of enterprise management software. The suite controls and tracks all aspects of project management, project and office accounting and administration.

Tenrox PSA can create complete project tracking cycles, track costs, trigger events with over expenditure thresholds, and can even break a project down to specific tasks within a project phase and associate rules with it. This product comes with industry-specific templates for accounting, banking, consulting and manufacturing.

Tenrox PSA can track employee group history. As an employee moves through a company both his personal history and group history can be tracked. Through the organization setup, one can create different activity lists associated with each user.

Also, a user can have an accounting constraint associated with his profile, such as a monthly allowance, where payments could be retained if the amount spent exceeds the constraint. Expense rules can be associated with each employee. One can also add new rules into the application.

Tenrox PSA is a Web interface for the main product. The Express has most of the functionality of the desktop product. It leverages the Internet for off-site consultants who need to fill timesheets and other schedules on a regular basis.

Administrators have the capability to create exception times for different activities for users, such as personal days or holidays.

Tenrox PSA also comes with an OLE library as part of its SDK called Tenrox SDK. With this suite, developers can integrate with other corporate applications and create product add-ons.

The service manager, one of the suite's tools, maintains two NT services that control e-mail notifications, perform scheduled batch operations and synchronize databases.

Analysis

The products reviewed in this suite were Tenrox PSA's Desktop, the database administration facility, and the Express. Three users were inserted into the system with various profiles. Each user filled timesheets and completed various expense reports. Some of the inputs were done through the client desktop and others through the Web interface.

Commentary

With an easy eight-step process, one can initialize this product to run an entire organization. This process was completed, using three users as input, in about an hour.

The user's profile was comprehensive and highly detailed. These profiles included security scopes where users can be assigned individual security profiles, general accounting information regarding expense codes, details on compensation, billing, skills, track working days, vacations, including breaks.

This product certainly simplifies the old way of handling and managing paper timesheets and expense spreadsheets.

Mario Morejon