[mims]

I have been playing with the beta since Friday and have a few questions.

1. I'm an editor of a magazine working on a Mac. My designer works on a Mac. All of the product people, outside writers, etc. are on PC. Is it possible to set up the program to enable me to send the task to someone by email which can be incorporated as a task in MS Outlook for PC, as a reminder for them? Is there a place to store email addresses with the assigned resource?

2. Our publication is a monthly. Therefore we use the same number of days for each phase of a project. Is it possible to just duplicate the file, change the start date and have all other dates adjust accordingly?

3. Will this program interface with a Windows Server? If so, which version.

Thank you for your help!
Mims

[Lizard]

1. There is already a place to store email addresses for each resource, in the Resource:Information inspector. Sending tasks via email to Outlook calendars is the sort of thing we'd like to make possible (even easy, hopefully!), but not in time for version one.

2. We do support templates right now, for precisely this scenario. (Fill in the resources, milestones, etc. that recur in every project, save as a template, then use it as a starting point for each project.) See the "Save as Template..." and "New From Template" items in the File menu.
However, these templates are sometimes a little funny about adjusting start dates of tasks when you change the project start date. We hope to improve this, but until we do, here's the work-around: save your template with "Unspecified Start Date"; then when you create a new project from that template, leave the start date unspecified until the day you start the project (when you are on "Day 1"). If you change the project start date to that day on that day, all your tasks should end up where you want them. And of course, you can adjust them from there if that month's schedule changes.

3. What sort of interfacing with a Windows Server are you looking for?

[mims]

Glad to know about the email addresses. That will be helpful. Can't wait til 1.0 is ready. (I really can't wait to show my boss!).

On my server question... Our organization has each person's outlook calendars stored on the server (for meetings, tasks, email, etc), so if this will interface with a server in this way, it could be very helpful. It would allow us to keep up with the percentage complete on tasks sent to PC users on our network. Right now our co server is running on NT, but they keep telling us they are updating to Win2000 server (someday). I've also heard rumors that they might upgrade to win2003.

Thanks for the helpful info on the recurring project and the workaround.

[Lizard]

Right now we don't really interact with servers much -- OmniPlan 1.0 is aimed at a single-user application. We're definitely starting to think about collaboration for 2.0, though. We'll aim for cross-platform standards, like ICalendar or CalDAV perhaps. (ICalendar is supported by MS Outlook, etc. --not specific to Apple's iCal!) I'm not sure how that maps to Windows server versions though.

To add onto the previous questions below - i too have been using the demo version and quite like the application, its interface and simplicity. I run a studio where i work on os x, but our other PMs are on windows machines. we run a central windows network server where all project docs and files are kept. i noticed however, i was unable to save a ".omniplan" file onto the server. Omniplan simply wouldnt allow me to do so. I assume this is a platform or file extension issue, but im not sure.

Any idea if this is an Omniplan issue, or something i can sort out on the network server side? Basically, this issue keeps me from using this as our PM application - unfortunately.

Also noticed, exporting to MXP (which our network does allow for), gives us the ability to import the project without issues into MS Project, however, exporting from MS Project to MXP, and importing into Omniplan seems to lose some of the data, specifcally the colorcoding of bars/milestones. Is there a better way to work between both apps? An alternative import/export process?

last question - when is the next version scheduled to release and what updates can we expect to see? i want to know what im commiting to if/when we decide to go with Omniplan.

thx,

[Lizard]

We've had one or two other reports of not being able to save OmniPlan files to a windows server or not being able to export html reports to a web server. Could you send an email about that to omniplan@omnigroup.com, with this info and any more specifics you can offer? (Does OmniPlan throw an error message, or is your server not listed in the save dialog? What's the error message? How do you connect to the windows server? smb?)

The MPX file format does not provide for any sort of style (color, font, etc.) information. We won't be able to preserve this information in the transfer until we read the Project XML format directly. That is something we really want to do in the near future, but it's too large a change for a minor update like 1.1.

I don't know how much I can say about our future plans, but I think we'll develop OmniPlan in a manner similar to that of our other major applications. Most of our apps get minor (free) updates every few months and a major (paid) upgrade every 1-3 years. I really can't say what will be in a specific release or when it will appear, because I'd just be working from our very rough plans, which are quite likely to change, and then people would just be angry that what I said was wrong.

[Lizard]

I tried saving on my home (windows) network, and then checked my results with some other people here. From what we've seen, the file does save successfully to the Windows server, but tells OmniPlan that it failed (and so OmniPlan also tells the user it failed). This happens in general with applications that save file wrappers, not just Omni's, so we're dependent upon Apple to fix it.

So, your files are likely saving correctly to the Windows server, but also throwing a bogus error.