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Many of the intranet products we profile in this space originate from large, well-known companies: Microsoft, Macromedia, and Groove Networks to name a few. But solid products can also come from small offices; in this case, an office of two.

IC Soft has released the second version of its task- and bug-tracking application icTracker, and it's a wonderfully simple way for intranet teams to organize all of their chores into one place and to measure overall progress. If you're a project manager and you've been wishing for an easy system that would let you delegate tasks and chart their progress, give icTracker's online demo a try.

icTracker originated as a bug-tracking tool, so if you head up an application development team, you'll find it an ideal way to send bug reports to your programmers. You can attach Web links or documents to your tasks, to illustrate the bug. But icTracker has grown beyond purely bug tracking into a full project management system.

The icTracker welcome screen shows users all their tasks and other options.

Harry Idachi is the chairman and prime mover behind IC Soft, based in Orinda, Calif., 20 miles east of San Francisco. Idachi has been a programmer for more than 20 years and has worked on his own as a business consultant and software developer since 1996. He didn't set out to create a task management system for businesses; he simply needed a bug tracking application for his own work with corporate clients. Idachi creates intranet and Windows applications for such high-profile companies as Levi-Strauss and Kaiser Permanente, and needed a system to help him track and repair bugs in his own coding.

The internal response to Idachi's application was so strong that in September, 2002, he decided to launch it as a standalone application. He says that while customer response to the 1.0 version was positive, and he received many excellent suggestions for improvements, demand was slow. That's because the first version was rudimentary, little more than the simple bug tracker Idachi himself was using. With user feedback, however, he saw that he needed to add greater customization options for the on-screen fields, and that users would appreciate a way to attach documents or links to their assigned tasks. The first version also offered only a basic search tool, which let users search on the defined fields. Version 2.0 has a more robust search, letting users search on any text entered into icTracker's database.

Idachi already sees an increased response to version 2.0. More users are trying it out and more are purchasing licenses. He even has version 3.0 well underway. It will offer an Oracle version that will be scalable and more suitable for larger corporations. He also plans to offer check-in/check-out security (so that two users can't work on the same document at the same time) and may simplify the installation process.

Keeping track of your tasks becomes simple with the right tools. and the right tools, like oak trees, often grow from small beginnings.

One of icTracker's viewing options lets users see a detailed explanation of all their open tasks.