OmniPlan in active development?

[Doug Lerner]

Thanks for your replies people.

I had a very good experience with OmniPlan yesterday, the first time  
I tried it. I was desperate to create a good timeline for a medium  
size project (lots of tasks, but few developers) and the customer was  
pressing for a coherent timeline. It was just impossible to do this  
manually - I needed a Gantt Chart.

I tried various things - trying to do it in Excel (ugh), I tried  
iTaskX - and then I came across OmniPlan. I got a 24 hour trial  
license and tried it out.

What made it work in OmniPlan was two things:

1. The resource leveler. iTaskX doesn't have that and it is  
absolutely vital to have a feature like that otherwise you end up  
scheduling mostly manually anyway. The leveler worked great and I got  
just what I needed.

2. The various exports, like vector PDF (which I gave to my customer)  
and the HTML full report are great.

I can see myself using OmniPlan constantly from now on. And I  
purchased a license this morning.

And now for my feature requests! (Surprisingly few!)

1. I would like to see more Gantt Chart customization options, such as:

	- Coloring the bars to match the colors of the task style.

	- Begin able to show the resource names by the bars in the Gantt  
chart without the "effort %".

	- Being able to apply styles to more column values, such as  
"priority". (Ex: all "priority 3" items get colored one way)

	- I mentioned this before, but I think there should be an option to  
reverse the meaning of the priority values so it corresponds with  
common English usage. That is "Priority 1" should be "top priority"  
rather than "bottom priority". It would make inputting the priority  
data less confusing, I think.

	- Maybe some more HTML report options enhancements - like being able  
to click on the tasks in the Gantt chart to show details. That would  
be cool.

But I am basically very happy for now, and have been showing off the  
project to people at the company I work with.

Thanks,

doug

On Mar 23, 2007, at 11:36 PM, Ken Case wrote:

> On Mar 23, 2007, at 6:50 AM, Doug Lerner wrote:
>> The only reason I was asking is because the version I downloaded  
>> from the site today was 1.0 and since it came out at the end of  
>> last year I thought it might be natural for the version to be like  
>> 1.01 or something like that since several months have passed since  
>> the original release.
>
> OmniPlan is under very active development:  we've had six public  
> beta releases since we shipped 1.0 three months ago.  For details  
> of what changed in each release, see the release notes at <http:// 
> www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/releasenotes/>.
>
> While this mailing list has been pretty quiet so far, you'll find  
> that there is a very active community on the OmniPlan web forums at  
> <http://forums.omnigroup.com/forumdisplay.php?f=37>.  (There have  
> been over a thousand posts in 261 threads.  Make that 262...)
>
> Our support ninjas do try to monitor both the mailing list and the  
> forums, but the fastest way to get a response from us is to send  
> email to them directly at omniplan at omnigroup.com or by selecting  
> "Send Feedback" from the Help menu.  We try to respond to every  
> message within one business day, and often respond even more  
> quickly than that.
>
> Hope this helps!
>
> 				Ken
>