IntelliGantt use of MS Project Resources

In talking with a few customers, I thought it would be worthwhile to produce a screencast showing how IntelliGantt can work with MS Project resources and turn them in to real people. It all revolves around the simplest forms of id: EMail.

We figure most everyone has an email address (or two), and most business applications account for this property-- like Microsoft Project! When you attach an email address to a resource in MS Project, IntelliGantt will recognize it and automatically match it up, whether you're sharing the project to a local file system, SharePoint, Groove or our Internet Workgroup.

Here is the direct link to the project resource screencast.

The next screencasts will be of IntelliGantt using custom SharePoint templates. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual :)

IntelliGantt Begins to Support Vista

Windows Vista is beginning to come up more and more, as expected. It's only a matter of time before it eclipses Windows XP since all (well... over 90%) new computers ship with Windows-- roughly 250 million a year, give or take. Obviously no company in their right mind would want to exclude 250 million potential customers, including us.

Though we haven't trumpeted it quite yet, the current release of IntelliGantt and IntelliGantt Plus will run on Vista and integrate with Groove 2007, Microsoft Project 2003 & 2007, MS Outlook (most versions), Windows Live Messenger and Mindjet MindManager 6.0 (and 7.0 as that is coming out shortly).

A few items remain-- spit and polish mainly. We're looking at the new requirements for full 100% Vista compatibility, but if you want to run IntelliGantt on Vista today, be our guest.

I have to admit I like the pretty, shiny features of Vista. In my opinion, it follows our philosophy of making things as user friendly as possible. I think our color scheme matches Vista out of the box quite nicely as well.

Well, back to getting our release ready for June 1 (which we will most likely announce of June 4-- who announces good news on a Friday?). We're pretty excited about this one, as are our partners. Support for SharePoint and Groove templates, nice speed improvements for MS Project synchronization, a few usability issues solved (the big one: no longer will you need to put the server name before your login name when using external SharePoint providers!!!)

All Coming Soon...

IntelliGantt does Groove Workspace Templates

We've been burning the midnight oil lately with our newest features, and with the price of oil being what it is today we decided its time to release another one:

IntelliGantt Plus now lets you specify the Groove Workspace Template to use when creating a new IntelliGantt Project. Anyone interested in Groove Forms development can create a template and then put it into their Groove Workspace Templates directory under My Documents. IntelliGantt will read the templates from this directory and offer them to the user. Here's a screenshot:



This is the first iteration of the feature. Right now if you need the TeamDirection Task List for tracking tasks, you will need to add it yourself to the template-- if our TD Task List is there, IntelliGantt will use it. In the future, we will make it automatic. But we thought the feature would be so nice in the hands of developers who know their vertical domain, but would like a simple task list to track things, that we thought the time was right.

This feature is in the shipping product, so you can download IntelliGantt Plus today and try it with your own template.

But the template vision isn't quite complete yet; SharePoint templates are coming too. We are in QA right now with general availability June 1. Just like Groove, we will query the SharePoint server for a list of all available templates with which to create a workspace. Again, developers can bring their domain knowledge, we connect to the standard SharePoint task list.

SharePoint templates demos coming soon...

Introducing a Local way to Share Projects

There is data, and then there is data. A few of our clients have cringed a bit when we tell them how easy it is to share valuable project data on the internet, in SharePoint or Groove. I tend to notice when clients cringe and, as a result, we've unveiled a feature-- the Local Workgroup.

Our IntelliGantt technology really doesn't care where a project is stored, it just needs everyone in the project to have access to it. Sometimes being on the internet makes sense because you may be working with external professional services. But many, many projects are still run strictly in house. In these cases, the easiest means to share projects may be right down the hall, tucked away securely in your corporate intranet and backed up regularly by your data retention policies.

I'm describing the common file server.

TeamDirection IntelliGantt can now use a simple file server to as the means to share and synchronize projects. Nothing will be more secure, and nothing will be faster- it simply doesn't have the latency other internet based solutions incur.

Here is an FAQ, with a screencast, showing just how well the Local Workgroup works. We still make it easy for you by making it simple to join projects and work interactively. The file server makes it easy for you by being simple, cheap and reliable.

So now you have four ways to share projects with your team, be they external consultants or internal colleagues. Intranet, Internet, SharePoint and Groove-- if you have a project management sharing requirement, chances are we've got it covered.

And do I mention it's also quite a bit more cost effective than those web server based solutions... *cough* eProject *cough*...?

SharePoint Buzz Raffling a Free IntelliGantt Plus License

SharePoint Buzz was kind enough to review IntelliGantt Plus for us. We provided a free license for a raffle that is closing as you read this. Actually, it may have closed yesterday, but don't let that stop you. IntelliGantt Plus is a rich, full-featured solution and free is always a nice price.

Check out the review, and check out IntelliGantt Plus. And don't forget about the two new features we've just released that make Plus even better.