We have a distributed workforce, lots of projects, remote clients, developers working on more than project at a time, and a large number of applications in support mode.

Whiteboards and sticky notes work well for a few projects and a local team. Excel and Google docs allow some remote sharing. Bug tracking software only is really useful for task and bug tracking.

So we are looking at finding one software package that can do product and release planning (stories or features), project management, Scrum/sprint management, bug tracking and also allows our clients to participate. It needs to integrate with our development environment (Visual Studio) and be installable locally (sorry, we like the cloud but some of our clients don't). The entire team from product managers and project managers, quality assurance and our clients must be able to interact. Ideally the product should also have some APIs so we can add to it if necessary.

The kicker?

We want it to be simple and relatively easy to use in development work flow so that developers are developing code and not spending lots of time managing information, documentation and projects.

Version One and Axosoft's OnTime seem to be candidates. Does anyone have experience with either or recommend something else?

I think our next step is to get some trial versions going and see what we like.