QG Software released 5pm, a Web-based project management service. There is quite a long list of features, including tree-style navigation, a timeline view, project groups, time zone support, and more.

In the “Projects” view, the left hand side shows the list of projects and current actions, and on the right hand side the related information, activity and files for a given project or task. Tasks that are overdue (that never happens in your projects, right?) show in red, and note the number of days that they are overdue by. Tasks where there are still days to run show in blue.

If you click on the “My stuff” tab to the right of the Projects tab, you get a flat list of all of the tasks that have been assigned to you. The UI doesn’t, apparently, allow for setting a context in which you will do that task, nor does it display the project that the task is associated with. It also doesn’t appear to offer nested tasks, email integration is something that is coming (I guess for notification of new and completed tasks), and there is no integration with Outlook or iCal at this time for seeing project task information within current tools.

One nice thing about 5pm is that you can easily get the permalink for a given task.

I set up a trial account, and tried a few things. One of those was access from mobile devices. There is no special capability for optimizing the data sent to a small form factor device, so loading the home page of my account with one project and two tasks was over 250KB of information … not something that you would want to do too often when paying for data traffic by the MB. Maybe this is something for a future edition.

Finally, when you set up a 5pm account you have to choose a unique prefix to the 5pmweb.com domain. Mine was “michaelsampson” (yeah, creative, I know). However, the use of this naming strategy raises issues for users, in that if they are involved in projects in multiple accounts, they will only be able to see projects and associated tasks one account at a time. They will not be able to get a global overview of everything that they are involved with, something that (a) I believe is sorely needed, and (b) I know is sorely lacking in many tools on the market.

There is a 14 day free trial available for any interested party, and after that pricing is based on the number of users and open projects, payable monthly. There are four standard plans, ranging from 5 users and 10 projects for $14 per month up to 40 users and 80 projects for $84 per month.

Want to learn more: take a sneak peak at the 2 minute Introduction Video.