When to Adapt Your Philosophy

TeamDirection and its IntelliGantt products have been built with the notion of working right out of the box, which is something of a novel ideal in this interconnected world. True, this is a good thing. In fact, IntelliGantt works very hard on the interconnected pieces so you don't have to-- integrating with MS Project, MindManager, SharePoint and Groove.

However, there comes a time when a feature is too compelling to grind under the foot of unyielding dogma. No one likes a Zax.

With our next release of IntelliGantt, we are introducing a feature that lets you publish projects to SharePoint utilizing any custom template registered on the SharePoint server. We've received feedback from customers and consultants alike that this will provide the best way to tailor projects to individual (company) needs. And we agree.

The result is IntelliGantt Plus will let you select the SharePoint template to use, but it will require a web service installed on the SharePoint server. It's a simple web service that is only in charge of listing available templates and creating a site based on a template. In fact, in large measure it got its inspiration from Todd Baginski's great examples on how to create SharePoint sites based on templates.

For about a month we struggled to with 'no code to install on the server'-- until it became untenable. Our new philosophy is a more realistic 'as little code as possible on the server, and make sure its well documented.'

You tell me how we did. We'll be updating or site over the weekend, but if you'd like to see IntelliGantt Plus using custom SharePoint templates on your server, then go get IntelliGantt Plus, read this document and install this web service.

Supports WSS 2.0, MOSS 3.0 and enables your team.

To see it in action, check out the screencast in the blog post below.