[Jacknan]

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Hello.
I bought OmniPlan a few months ago. What a nice app!
I really think you guys make GREAT software. Congrats!

I am just about to buy OmniFocus too, but I have a few questions I haven't been able to find out about.

Now that I know how to use OP and I watched the video tutorials on OF, I think what I REALLY want is some sort of "cross fusion" between these two apps...

Is there a way to import into OF the tasks and groups from OmniPlan? I ask because I have some nice plans in OP, but now that they are planned I want to actually DO them and manage that from OF. Can I do that? I don't see any useful export options for this in OP...

I really hope there is a way to do this sort of thing. It would be a VERY USEFUL inter-application technique. IOW, plan in OP and get it done with OF.
Does that make sense?

Thank you so much for your help, and I'm looking forward to buy OmniFocus.

[Brian]

Jacknan, the two apps aren't currently integrated, but this is something we're thinking about for the future. A number of customers have told us they'd like to see this happen; we figure ignoring that data would be a bad idea.

Just haven't had time on the schedule for all the relevant work.

[whpalmer4]

Lest you be too discouraged by Brian's post, this isn't just something they are thinking about doing — collaboration is a major focus of OmniPlan 2, and there have been prototypes of the OmniFocus side seen in OmniFocus for iPhone. That being said, the OmniFocus side of things apparently needs a lot more work, and OmniPlan 2 isn't even in general beta test yet, so it would be foolish to assume that you would get this functionality in a few months or any other short time frame. Sometimes if you propose what seems like a great idea (like a web interface for OmniFocus), you'll get back an answer from Brian or others at Omni that they will give it consideration, it sounds like a good idea, but they've got too much on their plate at the moment. In this case, not only have they considered it and thought it a good idea, they've done some work on it — but enough remains to be done that it is premature to even say which release it will go into, much less when that release will ship.

In the mean time, if you've got a plan in OmniPlan that you want to turn into actions in OmniFocus, there are some things you can do. The most obvious thing is to simply copy and paste. Select a group of tasks in OmniPlan, do command-C or Edit->Copy, switch to OmniFocus, click on the row handle (the dot to the left of the checkbox) where you want it to go, and do Edit->Paste. You can copy a hierarchy of tasks this way. Unfortunately, all you get is the task names and structure, no notes or resource assignments or dates/times.

You can also export to OmniOutliner format, and import that into OmniFocus (you don't need OmniOutliner). Unfortunately, at the moment, the dates get messed up, so it is a bit less than wonderful. You can however have dates not transferred as dates but comments in the notes field and set them yourself. This route does at least get much of the information beyond the task name into OmniFocus in some form.

Both of these schemes are one-way transfers, and you'll have to update your OmniPlan document by hand to follow your progress. Also, if you change the plan in OmniPlan, you'll have to repeat the process of moving it to OmniFocus. For that reason, you might want to just go with the copy/paste route, and only do the section of the plan you are going to work on immediately.

Finally, OmniPlan and OmniFocus have different notions about sequencing, with OmniPlan supporting a much richer descriptive ability. A sequential project in OmniFocus is similar to a bunch of tasks in OmniPlan stitched together via Finish->Start dependencies, but OmniPlan allows other dependency types, lead times (after you finish task 1, X time must pass before you start task 2), and other interrelationships not easily shown in OmniFocus. If you've got parallel paths in your OmniPlan document, with dependencies between the paths, it will be hard to show that in OmniFocus.

Even without a built-in linkage between the two, I find planning complicated projects in OmniPlan, then working the details from OmniFocus to be worth the trouble. At the least, it forces you to figure out when you'll need various resources and where the bottlenecks are in a way that is often difficult to discern from an OmniFocus project.

[Jacknan]

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Thank you for your responses.

@Brian:
Hopefully you will integrate them in the near future.
This necessity is so obvious it hurts!

Is there an OFFICIAL channel to make suggestions to OmniGroup's developers?

I ask because Omnigroup is definitely becoming one of my favorite software companies (now I think I also want OmniGraffle... <sigh>).
The more they succeed the better apps we get, so it's a win-win thing.

Actually, I'd love to see Omnigroup come up with something like OmniSUITE. This suite would be ALL your apps working beautifully integrated.
Think of MS's Office (minus the issues, of course).
I really think this would be a great concept to aim for... the future. The marketing guys could go crazy with this, LOL!

@whpalmer4:
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and thorough response!

Even if OP and OF are not yet integrated, I will go ahead and buy OF. I can tell right away that it, along with the GTD course, will be one of those true life-changing things for me.

OF is the app I always needed and wanted. Curiously, without knowing about it, I had been attempting (unsuccessfully) to implement some of the concepts of OF and GTD in iCal and Mail. It always felt clumsy and awkward, so OF definitely hit the nail on the head for me.

I will definitely experiment with the suggestions for the scenarios you mentioned. I know it's not perfect and it involves extra steps, but your ideas would give me some functionality for what I wanted.

Thanks again!

[whpalmer4]

Use Help->Send Feedback inside any of the Omni apps to send problem reports or feature requests to the developers. Forum posts aren't guaranteed to be seen by someone in a position to do something, but the email is.