[haralds]

I am looking to improve workflow and project management in my small engineering team. We all like the OmniGroup tools on Mac.

After spending a day to look at this I am beginning to realize that the native integration between OmniPlan and OmniFocus is really quite lacking. The group likes OmniFocus. But Basecamp sync's with it, while OmniPlan does not!!!!

I have looked at work arounds, but come up short everywhere.

Very disappointing - and a likely reason we might not go the OmniPlan route...

[haralds]

I cannot express, how disappointed I am. I like client based tools, and am not a fan of browser apps for mission critical stuff like project planning.

Anybody have any ideas?

[whpalmer4]

There's very interesting OmniPlan-OmniFocus integration in the works. Unfortunately, the OmniFocus side of things isn't ready to go...

[psidnell]

Rob Trew's op->of and of->op scripts are remarkably useful, but that's a long way short of proper integration or sync.

I'd love to have better integration too but wonder just how deep the integration can be, given the very different underlying purpose of the tools.

While there is a lot of overlap between the attributes of tasks in each tool, there are significant differences elsewhere. For example projects, contexts and perspectives only exist in OF while resources, calendars etc only exist in OP. If a task is created in one tool, how will the other deal with the missing attributes? It's certainly not obvious to me.

I got the impression (I can't remember where) that what was being mooted was that from OP, a "manager" would be able to send a task to a resource (minion, serf, uniform plastic employee). It would arrive in their inbox at which point they could assign it to a project/context, add a dancing cat gif attachment, whatever...

When the task finally gets completed, some form of notification goes back to the managers OP and the plan gets updated.

This may be confabulation on my part, but this seems like a plausible useful minimum level of integration.

My choice would be to smash the two tools together to produce one huge Godzilla scale application, but just imagine the size of the user manual!

[elektroglide]

Originally Posted by psidnell

My choice would be to smash the two tools together to produce one huge Godzilla scale application, but just imagine the size of the user manual!

i don't share the view (or don't appreciate the fact if it is one) that the data for any particular action need be so incompatible between the apps, and i think at least optional linking of any action or group of actions or projects to omnifocus from omniplan, plus automatic updating on completion in both apps should be implemented sharpish.

i don't see (in my wisdom) any reason why focus and plan views need not simply be different views in one app, or act as if they were one app... one with a focus on planning, and the other on execution.

i've yet to reply to a lengthy explanation from one of the development team of why omni apps should not be integrated into an omnisuite, but i didn't find it entirely convincing. it's as much a conceptual difference as a technical one. where there's a will there's a way...

[elektroglide]

the reason why i found this thread is because i keep hesitating to buy omnifocus until there is integration between that and omnifocus, which i use a lot, and with increasing satisfaction...