We are currently reviewing solutions for managing our projects. Mingle is one candidate. Mingle is an agile project management product created by ThoughtWorks Studios. I have used it in the past on projects at 3M and Inetium and I really liked it. On those projects, however, I had the luxury of an internal network infrastructure and a team to maintain it.

At HumanStuff, we strive to keep our overhead low and outsource things that are not part of our core business. This enables us to stay focused on our bread and butter – providing high quality software consulting services to our customers. So one key consideration when reviewing project management solutions is whether or not it is offered as a hosted solution or Software as a Service (SaaS) so we don’t have to manage the infrastructure.

I have made a few attempts to try to find out if Mingle would be offered as a service. I finally received confirmation today from a ThoughtWorks representative the answer is no. This information was surprising given the number of articles I found stating the contrary (e.g. InfoQ). This makes the decision to choose Mingle as our project management solution much more difficult and will probably eliminate it as a candidate.

What do you think about Mingle not being available as a service? Are there a number of people who would be interested in this or are all of you Minglers just hosting it yourself?