Bamboo Solutions PM Central Integration

We're keeping this here for posterity, but if you're looking for a great SharePoint Gantt Chart for visualizing and aggregating SharePoint tasks, we recommend the IntelliGantt Web Part. Bamboo Solutions recently invited us to kick the tires on their PM Central solution. Since IntelliGantt already integrates with their Task Master and Project Portfolio Dashboard, it seemed like a natural. Thankfully, the PM Central solution packages the Task Master and Dashboard into well planned and visually rich SharePoint templates geared toward the project manager and team.

The result is impressive-- a comprehensive view of all your projects with detailed project information in every site. The only thing missing was the ability to synchronize IntelliGantt and Microsoft Project plans. That's where we come in.

Using IntelliGantt or the IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project you can work with your current project plans in PM Central with your team. The project manager plans the schedule and scope, the team report their progress and give their feedback. Where PM Central really shines is with the summary rollups management is always interested in seeing.

We created a page giving you the detailed steps to get IntelliGantt up and going with PM Central and the Task Master. We think it can be done is less than 3 minutes the first time you try. The result will be a schedule the project manager owns, but a plan visible to the entire team.

A Few Hundred Pages of Documentation...

... makes for a quiet blog.

I'm currently helping a client migrate several terabytes worth of data into their SharePoint server. It's a fun problem as there's a Siebel CRM application that most of the business folks use, which of course needs to integrate with SharePoint. Naturally you'd think it'd be easy (heh heh). The issue was every document was being stored in Siebel as an attachment to entities and activities, which makes it really hard to do document management things such as versioning. They developed a system that sort of worked, but when a big government agency asks you about your document management strategy... well, then attachments don't look so good.

The document management and versioning answer turned out to be SharePoint, but the trick was how to match Siebel's relational view of the world with SharePoint's hiearchical (as in web addressing) view. It turned out the business organization had a natural encapsulation within Siebel that lended itself very well to a URLs hiearchical requirements. So we developed an addressing scheme the Siebel developers could generate from Siebel data, transform it into a URL using predefined rules and thereby point users to the right spot in SharePoint.

And did I mention a few hundred pages to document this all? Just adding to the terabytes!

IntelliGantt in the Show Me State

There's no such thing as bad press-- especially when it's really good.

I had the pleasure to read Jamie Scheppers post describing her experience with Basecamp, Microsoft Project and IntelliGantt. In addition to showing the superb level of education the University of Missouri provides, it also captures the exact user scenario IntelliGantt is designed for-- bringing systems together in order to bring people together.

We're happy to provide a solution that makes sense and look forward to working with Jamie and other Basecamp users to improve the experience, provide more features and make the integration that much better.

If you've got something to say, be sure to let us know!