On paper, Copper Project from Australian developers Element Software has it all. It has everything we could wish for from a content management system.

We took a look at the $29 a month hosted (or $499 download for your own server) versions.

This is a fully featured system. A great deal of thought has gone into what’s needed in a system and they have all the elements in place.

There’s an excellent multi project overview in the “Springboard”. Here you can see the progress of your various projects and the current tasks within those projects.

You go to the clients section to drill down into the various projects that you’d be doing for a client. Each client is split into Projects, Files and Contacts.

Your Projects section at the top level gives you an overview of the status of each project and the tasks contained within. Clicking on a project and you have various options as seen below:

Interestingly within this section you have gantt charts, displayed in Flash, complete with dependencies. Whilst this is a commendable idea, I found the gantt chart fiddly to operate and mildly confusing, so in the end I didn’t bother with them, which was a pity.

Copper Project also offers a Calender which can start to look a little confusing with you have a lot of information stored in it, a little work on the interface would improve things immeasurably.

There’s also a Contacts facility which seemed to work very well, and very useful it is too.

All in all, this system has pretty much everything I am looking for. It is fully featured and in the main well executed.

So the downside? Again, as with so many web applications, lack of personalisation means that you are stuck with the colour palette the developer chooses. Blue in this case.

I found entering task information to be a bit cumbersome - as a company we are entering tasks all the time. I’d like to be able to enter a task as soon as I enter a project, not have to go through the menus.

My biggest problem with the $29 a month system is that I cannot import or export my information. I’m damned if I am going to enter 5,500 contacts one by one into the system.

I’d also say that the pricing and what you get for your money is confusing. $29 a month buys me a 10 user “Standard 2007″ system. $99 buys a 50 user “Corporate 2006″ system. Why do you get a 2007 version for less money, what’s the difference between the two packages? All very confusing.

That said, Copper Project is an very well featured product, and if I could get around the import/export problem and ease the entering of tasks, then I could quite easily switch from our Basecamp/Highrise setup.