An anonymous reader writes: I work as a jack of all trades IT person at a smallish manufacturing company. One of the main challenges the company is facing right now is determining how long it will take to ship a product. The Manufacturing Manager came to me and asked about Project Management Software and I pointed him towards OpenProj. A few days later he asked me to get quotes on Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server. Having had experience at a larger IT department that used MS Project to plan an infrastructure upgrade and not being very impressed with the results, I was going to tell him that it was a bad idea. I stopped myself short and realized I need to educate myself a little further. The basic idea is that we would like to follow projects from requisition of materials, to engineering, to various stages of manufacturing and be able to tell how long the project would take based on availability of resources (employees, machines) and the time needed to complete each step. Does anyone have any recommendations on books/web sites that may help me in determining if an OpenProj/MS Project type solution would be right for our situation? Any ideas on really solid packages that are similar (or even something completely different that might be better)? Anyone have any particularily good or bad experiences using implementing Project software? I really don't have a clue where to begin.