OmniPlan is a forest-view tool, helping project managers visualise/organise and manage the progress of the team's work.
OmniFocus is an individual tool, aimed at assisting one person with managing their workload and tracking their various tasks.
Does it seem rather obvious that they should be linked?
For OmniFocus, the user (call him A) should be able to see tasks assigned to him, their due dates etc (populated from OP). He should be able to update OF to reflect his progress, and have that automatically reported to OP. Upstream progress on tasks of others, upon which his ability to execute his own work depends, should be visible to him.
Tasks that have changed, in due dates or whatever, should be reflected in OF and his attention called to those changes.
Other than the actual populating of tasks and updates regarding them (and maybe not even that), the OF interface oughtn't get cluttered up by this, so much as a new pane/interface, a sort of project Dashboard, would allow this information to be propagated into A's OF instance w/o undermining his ability to use OF.
For OmniPlan, some way to manage this interaction, as well as interface with the rest of the workplace IT ecosystem (meaning LDAP, etc) would be nice. Ideally a PM could:
a) modify their plans
b) view other PM's plans (read-only or not, based on permissions)
c) send updates to their team members
d) get updates automatically from their OF instances about progress through those team members' tasks
... all from within OP.
This interaction would probably have to be mediated through some central program, an OmniProject Server that might run on whatever machine hosts the local intranet. It could hold the information represented in each person's OF, the various OP instances, and provide synchronization. Having some centralised way to backup everyone's task information, provide reports on current activities, would all be very useful.
I realise these features aren't needed for very small workgroups, individuals, etc, but they would help w/ the adoption of these programs at (say) my workplace. Perhaps this implies an OmniFocus Pro and an OmniPlan Pro pair of products, either sold individually or packaged with OmniProject Server.
Thoughts?
-RS
OmniFocus is an individual tool, aimed at assisting one person with managing their workload and tracking their various tasks.
Does it seem rather obvious that they should be linked?
For OmniFocus, the user (call him A) should be able to see tasks assigned to him, their due dates etc (populated from OP). He should be able to update OF to reflect his progress, and have that automatically reported to OP. Upstream progress on tasks of others, upon which his ability to execute his own work depends, should be visible to him.
Tasks that have changed, in due dates or whatever, should be reflected in OF and his attention called to those changes.
Other than the actual populating of tasks and updates regarding them (and maybe not even that), the OF interface oughtn't get cluttered up by this, so much as a new pane/interface, a sort of project Dashboard, would allow this information to be propagated into A's OF instance w/o undermining his ability to use OF.
For OmniPlan, some way to manage this interaction, as well as interface with the rest of the workplace IT ecosystem (meaning LDAP, etc) would be nice. Ideally a PM could:
a) modify their plans
b) view other PM's plans (read-only or not, based on permissions)
c) send updates to their team members
d) get updates automatically from their OF instances about progress through those team members' tasks
... all from within OP.
This interaction would probably have to be mediated through some central program, an OmniProject Server that might run on whatever machine hosts the local intranet. It could hold the information represented in each person's OF, the various OP instances, and provide synchronization. Having some centralised way to backup everyone's task information, provide reports on current activities, would all be very useful.
I realise these features aren't needed for very small workgroups, individuals, etc, but they would help w/ the adoption of these programs at (say) my workplace. Perhaps this implies an OmniFocus Pro and an OmniPlan Pro pair of products, either sold individually or packaged with OmniProject Server.
Thoughts?
-RS