The Omni Group

The latest update to OmniPlan is here, and it’s a good one! It comes with new support for balancing resource loads across multiple projects, auto-leveling of resources, localizations for Apple’s Tier-1 languages, and a whole bunch of crash fixes, interface clarifications, and bug fixes.

278 fixes, to be exact! Get your release notes here.

It’s also identifiable by this brand new icon, following in the footsteps of seven new (Omni Group) icons before it.

Resource Load Sharing

One of the biggest requests for OmniPlan 2.1 has been the ability to manage multiple resources across multiple projects. With Resource Load Sharing, we’ve developed a great way to do that.

• Use our Sync Server or your server repository to publish and sync all of your projects.
• Assign an email address to each resource. (This is how OmniPlan keeps track of, say, two John Smiths.)
• Make sure “Subscribe to other projects’ resource loads” is checked in your Publishing & Subscriptions configuration.

And here’s a friendly video about exactly that:

Our Transmogrifier

One of the changes that we introduced in the first beta of 2.1 was a switch to a new Microsoft Project importer/exporter. Because of the Mac App Store’s restriction on optionally-installed software, we had to make our converter—the Transmogrifier, as we call it—a downloadable add-on. We decided the best option for everyone was to completely rewrite it.

In the final version of OmniPlan 2.1, it’s turned off by default. If you have the time to try it, please do. We’d love to get a wider swath of test files to really put it though its paces.

To enable the new importer/exporter, use the following hidden defaults (in Terminal):

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniPlan2 UseNativeMSPFilters -bool true

For the Mac App Store version:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniPlan.MacAppStore UseNativeMSPFilters -bool true

If you’d like to go back to 2.0-style Microsoft Project support, replace true with false.

Use OmniPlan▸Check for Updates. If you don’t have OmniPlan installed, grab it here. The Mac App Store version will be available after approval.