IntelliGantt Update -- Local Workgroup Catching On

We just posted an update to IntelliGantt on our server tonight, mainly for maintenance reasons. I'll list some of the bug fixes shortly but also wanted to touch on which platforms are garnering the most attention. As you might expect, most IntelliGantt customers are using it with SharePoint. And the trend is accelerating (stay tuned to this space for exciting SharePoint developments in the near future).

But you knew that already.

So what do you think is the second most used collaboration platform? If you think the title of this post gives it away, you are right-- the Local Workgroup.

We've recently had a wave of people looking for a simple way to collaborate on a project schedule with their colleagues-- even simpler than setting up a web server. Because IntelliGantt can use a humble file server to collaborate (essentially a 'multi-user' mode) people have been dusting off some basic hardware and letting the tasks fly on their intranets. With IntelliGantt's Local Workgroup, you don't have to repeatedly send email to everyone or copy files hither and yon. It's one location that everyone synchronizes. I'll have to get a better screencast showing it off, but in the meantime here is a peek at it, and an FAQ.

Project management with a file server... who knew? :)

Here are the major fixes/improvements in this update:

1) The Local Workgroup wasn't providing useful error messages when one or more users did not have permission on the file server to update projects. This has been corrected with better reporting when you join and synchronize projects.

2) When using SharePoint, IntelliGantt wasn't handling the absence of a column very well. For example, many people don't need the 'Priority' column int the basic SharePoint task list. When they removed that column, IntelliGantt got confused. Now it looks at the task list schema to see which columns are available and nimbly stays on top of things. (This also lays a bit of foundation for our next SharePoint features).

3) Both the MS Project and MindManager Add Ins had a problem getting user lists from the WSS 2.0 or SharePoint Portal Server 2003 collection. It only affected MS Project 2007 and MindManager 7. The problem would manifest itself by acting as if a project is being published to a SharePoint site, but then falling back to the Share wizard screen. Thanks very much to our friends in the Netherlands for helping us track this one down!

4) If a member was listed as "last name" comma "first name" (ie. Smith, John), MS Project didn't like this. As a result we look for resources with commas and make them acceptable to MS Project so Export and Synchronize work correctly.

5) Finally, we seriously improved the help files for all the products. Thank you Jeff! Visit this page for help file reading pleasure.

Now we're off working on the next great IntelliGantt features. It will be geared toward SharePoint since that is our burgeoning market, but we'll see if we can throw a few things into the Local Workgroup community as well, since that is our fastest growing.