[mroe]

I've been reading this thread with great interest. I'm excited about the prospect of OmniPlan and OmniFocus having a tightly-integrated future and have been since the first alpha of OmniFocus was revealed. It seems obvious that they are a perfect dovetail for project management and project execution. However, I think the real tour-de-force will not merely be a discreet program (OmniPlan) allowing a single user to create tasks for others to action (OmniFocus), although this will be a handy thing, but an entirely integrated, networked system of the two, published to a central server and synchronised in realtime (Like a FileMaker Pro database). This would provide broad visibility of project status to multiple parties including realtime advice of task completion and resource allocation/usage - all live!

In short, it could pretty much immediately become the operational tool of choice for small-medium collaborative working environments (which is an enormous percentage of the commercial marketplace).

OmniWork anyone?

(A five-user license would make a nice bundle with MacOS X Server...)

The key would be in the two-way feed of data; allowing the client to push info back to the server so it wasn't merely a one-way stream. The potential for productivity (and continuous feature enhancements) is almost limitless. Imagine if the projects were to be published online and could be accessed by anyone from a standard browser (and reports could be extracted and job lists downloaded even by those without the client apps).

Imagine if the whole system were in fact web-based (like many open-source project management systems). Although this is less desirable for a number of reasons, it would at least be platform agnostic and not require any software download.

In fact, long term, this "OmniWork" solution would be an ideal candidate to be Googlized and become a 'software as a service' app. But I digress, again...

First step will be nice; having the two programs seamlessly integrated, with compatible data and intelligent hooks.

Then to develop them into a collaborative, realtime, hosted groupware platform will solve half the management and efficiency problems of business teams everywhere.

Then, who knows, Mr Omni?