[awilliams]

We've started to use OmniPlan in my office for project planning. So far it's been working great. We're struggling a bit with workflow though.

We have a release manager who is in charge of maintaining the schedule. There are multiple teams that report to this manager. Each team has generated their own project timeline for the pieces of the project under their control. The release manager then merged the various project files together (one file per team).

I've seen quite a few posts asking about an omniplan server type thing, add me to the list of people who'd love one. That said, I suspect it's a ways out so we're trying to work on some home grown solutions.

Is there any documentation available on how to deal with omniplan's xml file? We'd love to be able to add custom fields that can be used to mark external dependencies, and write some software that would intelligently merge the two files together based setting dependencies based on those custom fields. Levelling would still have to be handled in the merged file, but that seems much more straight forward than trying to manually resolve the dependencies post merge.

We'd also like to stand up a CGI or something similar that would allow each individual contributor to update their %done on the tasks they own.

I spent a little time looking at the XML file, and I don't know that I can reliably pull the information I need from it. I can make sense of it with small sample projects but I quickly get lost when looking at the XML for an actual project.

If not, I completely understand :)

[Lizard]

You can add custom fields to tasks, resources, or the whole project directly in the user interface of OmniPlan. There's a "Custom Data" inspector for that.

The best way to add your own functionality on to OmniPlan may be to write some AppleScripts. That way, you can let OmniPlan handle the internal logic of keeping (for example) the task end date up to date when you change the task duration. If you start editing the XML directly, your code needs to know more about the relationship between those fields. Also, if OmniPlan's file format changes (as it likely will for version 2.0), you'll need to rewrite a lot of stuff.

Some people are already discussing stuff like this over in the OmniPlan Extras forum. You may do better to seek help over there. If you have specific questions while developing your solution (either with AppleScript or editing the XML), please feel free to ask them.