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.

How to Find Overallocated Resources

First you need and IntelliGantt solution!

We've just put the finishing touches on two new features. I'll profile our new 'Local Workgroup' in a couple days. Today I want to show you how easy it is to identify overallocated resources in one project AND across many projects.

Here's a pretty picture of several projects with their overbooked tasks highlighted.



Better yet, here is a screencast.

What it shows is a simple filter that can be applied to a project, or any group of projects. IntelliGantt has two filters that can work in conjunction. One filter is for things task related like 'ToDo' or 'This week's tasks'. To this filter we have added 'Show Overbooked Tasks'. The algorithm takes all resources and all tasks in the working set and computes which resources have been overallocated. These tasks are then listed in the task grid and gantt chart.

The other nice thing about how this feature is implemented is the highlights don't go away when you select another filter. For example, if you wanted to see the overbooked tasks in relation to all tasks, select the 'Show all tasks' filter. The overbooked tasks will retain their markings and will be easy to spot-- even with all the other tasks in view. Overbooked tasks can run, but they can't hide :)

Finally, we upgraded the resources filter so that instead of only one resource to filter against, you can have many. This means you can see two or three people's overbooked tasks at once. Or, for that matter, two or three people's ToDo lists, or their tasks next week.

Check out the screencast, and if you're impressed, download IntelliGantt Plus for a 15-day free trial. There's lots more to impress you.

It's Been Quiet.... Too Quiet...

But that will change soon.

Just in case you haven't noticed the pattern yet, this blog usually goes quiet right before we announce cool new stuff. Well, the cool new stuff is coming. I have to work on the screencast now and show the world.

What will it be?

An even easier way to share tasks and a great way to find resources accidentally overallocated-- both within a project and across many projects.

Screencasts coming soon!

Vicarious Travel

What's it like to be single, no kids and able to work online? A friend of mine is taking the opportunity to find out. He decided the other week that he wants to work in Peru. Not changing jobs, mind you, just physically be in Peru while he continues his day job. What's that? Running his company TriLeet.

I don't match the profile he has, but I can (and am quite happy to) read his 'working' blog and vicariously enjoy the scene.

I guess he got a little Stir Crazy (his blog).

It's a travelogue, so its best to start with his first post and work backwards.

Flexible Pricing Model

Consultants have been keenly interested in IntelliGantt project management because it makes it so easy to share tasks with colleagues and customers. Often they would like to leverage a client's SharePoint installation in order to share project schedules and status. Other times they just need a way to keep everyone update to date.

One common feature consultants need is a flexible pricing plan. In truth, this applies to companies that hire consultants as well. What we've heard again and again leads us to believe a project that spans people and companies is most likely an ad-hoc project. As a result, time and again we've heard the purchasing manager ask if they can re-use licenses.

For example, say project A started last January and is just wrapping up. As the project manager starts planning the next project, perhaps he/she will use several consultants or contractors again, and one or two consultants for the first time. What about the consultant they bought a license for back in January? Wouldn't it be nice to re-use that license for the new people?

We think it would too!

Therefore we've implemented time-limited licenses: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and Unlimited. Now you can purchase a 3 month license for the project starting this month (and outfit everyone very reasonably, I might add). When the project is done, your licenses are done too. If you need another project, buy a few more short-term licenses.

If you have a consistent group through the year, buy a longer term license for them, and a shorter term license of others. You can mix and match licenses just as you can mix and match IntelliGantt, IntelliGantt Plus and the IntelliGantt MS Project Add In.

It's the same product with the same features. Basically you decide how long you want it to run. It's our job to make project management as easy, rich and elegant as possible so IntelliGantt is always your best choice for running a virtual team.

Check out the pricing on our purchase page.

Scoble Interview Published

If you're looking to meet some of the people behind TeamDirection, Robert Scoble provides the chance. Here he is interviewing, of all people, me.

This was a lot of fun to do, and I like how it turned out. My head doesn't even look too shiny.

On a serious note, though, I read on Robert's blog the serious news of the day. I sincerely hope a few bad apples don't spoil what people like Robert bring to the online community. The Scoble show is a great opportunity for companies with cool stuff to spread the word. I, for one, believe he is doing an essential service of connecting consumers and producers. We should be thanking people that put themselves out there like Robert or Kathy Sierra.

They make the world a better place.

Independent Groove User Group Forming

Jim Moffat has taken the initiative and is forming a Groove User Group that looks very interesting. I've joined up and will add what I can. Other prominent Groovers are also coalescing around www.grooveuser.org.

Not to say Microsoft hasn't been pushing Groove hard enough. I'm sure you won't hear anyone say such a thing. I know I'm not going to say Microsoft hasn't been pushing Groove hard enough...

The thing is, it's still a great virtual team solution, but now it has to prove its right to exist within the gargantuan MS Office world. Honestly, Groove could use another zero or two at the end of its install base numbers to become a full-fledged member of MS Office.

But, by providing a still compelling solution for virtual teams, by inspiring enough from its user base to form user groups and maybe even by still having a special place in Ray Ozzie's heart, Groove will get those numbers.

Venture Capitalists, Chickens and Eggs

Don Dodge had an interesting post the other day that speaks to an issue front and center in my mind: Venture Capitalists and Angels invest $40 Billion per year but see only $18B in exits. Why is that?

Venture Capitalists are an interesting breed. They sit on a pile of money, keep it warm and look for the next sure thing to hatch. Most often the next sure thing has already hatched and is busily rewarding the investors who helped them get their start as they make one of life's nicer choices: Acquisition or IPO?

In other words, there are no sure things. It's all about the risk.

So what to make of VC firms that look to 'add value' to a company already making money, but not really big money. Who doesn't want to make really big money, right?

TeamDirection would like to break into the big money stratosphere just as much as the next company, but at what cost? For instance, we are currently building our inside sales presence and becoming more customer facing. Before, we relied on Groove Networks to handle the heavy lifting of Sales and Marketing. This was a nice arrangement as we could focus on some heavy technology-- merging distributed sets of data into one cohesive whole. Presenting multi-user applications in a single steady state to all users. Non-trivial tasks we had to make easy.

This is not to toot our own horn (much). Sales and Marketing are just as difficult and hard-- technology people like myself just don't know it yet. (When they start their own company, they figure it out!) Honestly, it would be nice to have help now and then to build an internal sales and marketing organization. For me, this is the siren song of the VC.

You know technology, We know sales.

Remember back in the day when people were up in arms over rock music being played backwards on phonographs? Even in 2007, it can still be fun thing to do-- especially for VC siren songs. Play this song backwards and you get:

Show us your chicken, and we'll show you our eggs.

It's really odd, but it seems the more successful TeamDirection is becoming, the more VC phone calls I'm fielding. The latest pitch was, in essence:

If you build a successful inside sales and marketing organization, we can help you build a bigger sales and marketing organization.

Hmm.. well, I'm starting from scratch and building something out of nothing. It's kind of like that old tune about becoming a millionaire (I'm not-- I'm referring to Barron's popular refrain):

The First Million is the Hardest.

I'll lay it out straight-- at this point I'm much more interested in getting help building a successful sales and marketing team than applying MBA measurements and improving a successful sales and marketing organization.

Now that is worth a reward, and a lot of chickens, in my humble opinion.

Building Intuitive UIs

If you've read any of my posts at ReadWriteWeb, you know I love to look at things with an eye towards the past. So many times a new problem is really an old problem. Like User Interface Design.

I came across this video (Introducing the Book) while reading Scott Maxwell's blog. After I stopped laughing, I began to think about our own UI and how well it performs for our customers-- especially for a 'complex' business segment like project management.

In my opinion, we're doing pretty well. In fact, we recently did a screencast to show a few UI niceties we bring to project management. Little things like telling you whether your tasks are to the left or to the right of your current Gantt view. Or showing you why you can't link two tasks together-- highlighting the path that would create the circular link.

But I don't think we've built the most intuitive UI by any stretch. Project Management does have a certain amount of complexity. Connecting business systems to the web is not trivial. However, if you happen to hear from a customer 'That's all you have to do?', then you know you're on the right path.

And we do listen to our customers.

A Note for Groove Project Edition Users

Hello out there!

What a transition it has been since Microsoft purchased Groove way back in March of 2005. I'll bet you can count the number of communication updates regarding your Groove product on one hand.

First of all, I would like to stress that TeamDirection will be supporting TeamDirection tools within Groove Project Edition until June of 2009. I know there are many companies of all sizes currently (happily) using this product. It's one of those software releases that just works. So if you're not in a hurry to upgrade to Groove 2007, I understand.

TeamDirection will make it as easy as possible to continue running your feature-rich Groove 3.x software for a couple years to come. We will also make it as easy as possible when you're ready to move to the Microsoft Office edition of Groove.

One thing you should be aware of, however, is TeamDirection has no plans for adding any more features into the Groove Project Edition set. We are very excited about our product mix going forward, of which Groove is a major part. In addition to Groove, we've been able to bring our years of collaborative experience to other platforms as well.

We've added support for SharePoint 2003 and 2007, and a new creation-- our Internet Workgroup, which incorporates Amazon S3 services to make sharing projects ridiculously easy. Groove 3.x was a great market, but now events have pushed everyone into the even larger Microsoft Office ecosystem.

It will be interesting to see what life is like for the Groove customer base once its multiplied by a few factors.

IntelliGantt Milestones

There's a nifty feature in the new IntelliGantt products that we've seriously under-represented. In fact, I just put up a new screencast that mentions it (Tour Project Features).

If I recall, I believe this feature came as a result of a request from Siemens. Their project managers had grown rather cross with dumb milestones. They had gone through the trouble linking milestones to tasks, but then pointed out the futility of their efforts as these milestones behaved as individual entities.

For example, even if all the predecessor tasks of a milestone were to be incomplete, or even late, a milestone could still be marked complete. This made it rather difficult for project managers to filter large projects such that only milestones would be visible. Actually, it wasn't the filtering that was hard, it was the ambiguity of the milestones themselves-- would you trust a completed milestone not knowing the state of its predecessors?

TeamDirection went about solving this problem, and the solution ships with IntelliGantt today. We made our milestones, er... intelligent. If a milestone has a predecessor, then that milestone reflects the status of its predecessor. If the predecessor isn't complete, then the milestone isn't complete.

In fact, this works on down a chain of predecessors. For instance, if the immediate predecessor of a milestone is on track, but its predecessor is behind, then the milestone will be behind. A milestone is only shown as completed if all its predecessors are completed! This lets project managers (or other interested parties) filtering on just milestones get a more accurate read on areas of the project that may have problems.

Displaying accurate information and identifying potential issues as soon as possible gives you more time to communicate issues and make corrections-- both of which help your projects succeed.

TeamDirection has a 15 day free trial so you can try out some intelligent milestones today.

SharePoint/Project Use Case

As we've been enriching our integration with SharePoint and Groove, a use case is coming up that is neither wrong nor right-- it's just expectations.

Currently in IntelliGantt Plus, if you publish a project to a SharePoint workspace, IntelliGantt will be selective in how it updates. For instance, if a GUEST logs into the workspace, obviously SharePoint will not allow them to edit tasks. But what about a contributor?

We've designed things such that, if you are a contributor in SharePoint, you must be assigned to a task in order to update it. We can't tell SharePoint to disable those fields as if you were a guest. Rather, when IntelliGantt Plus synchronizes with the SharePoint task list, it examines who made the change to the updated task.

If you are not a manager, not a guest, but in fact a contributor, then IntelliGantt checks for task assignment. If the contributor is not assigned to the task, the updates will be tossed and IntelliGantt will reinsert its view of the task. If the contributor is assigned to the task, then the changes are reflected in the IntelliGantt project.

This works well for the project manager monitoring the project. They don't want to let just *anybody* update tasks. However, what if team members wish for a less restrictive approach. For example, maybe there are no task assignments. Everybody has the ability to change any task. This is in fact how our Internet Workgroup works, but with SharePoint we wanted to make use of permissions.

Perhaps we need a less restrictive mode? In talking with project managers, no-one wants to give up our current assignment enforcement. However, we do look to be inclusive-- and if some people would like to have more of a 'free-for-all', we are listening.

Freudian Slip

The picture of the Fire Rainbow I posted the other day certainly received a lot of attention. Thanks for all the interesting comments. The one I really enjoyed, however, was a nastygram from, of course, an anonymous commenter.

Pathetic way to steal a photograph, you didn't even clone out the (C) AP. This has to be a joke or you are about as stupid as one can me.

Heh heh, can't argue with that :)

Fun With Blog Statistics -- Who is Using What

We make project management software. And while we would like to do it for every platform, right now our IntelliGantt suite runs only with .NET on Windows platforms, or really good Windows virtualization platforms.

However, anyone can certainly come and look at TeamDirection's wares. And it's interesting to see who does. For example, according to our logs we recently had an XBox come check out the site. Just one so far, but you never know what might be a latent market.

For instance, Microsoft will cringe to hear that Sony has an 1,100% advantage with the number of PlayStation portables visiting TeamDireciton with a full 11 gamers checking out project management software. Maybe they like the simplicity in sharing tasks.

Mac OS makes a surprisingly strong showing, with 12.6% of our traffic. I believe this is because of our rich SharePoint integration. This lets a project manager running Windows use IntelliGantt software, and when they share tasks to SharePoint, Mac users in turn can participate via their browser. Although with a number of 12.6%, a Mac platform has piqued my interest.

Linux makes a showing, but only for 5% of our traffic. Of course, they get the same benefits as make users as Firefox browsers on Linux work just fine for interacting with Microsoft SharePoint. Linux users too can update their assigned tasks.

Finally, for the odds and ends we have the following:

IBM OS/2 12 viewers
Be OS 8
Symbian OS 1

and finally...

Windows 3.x 37 viewers

What are you people doing on Windows 3.x?

The Week Ahead

With all due respect to Frank Sinatra, it's time to start spreading the news.

TeamDirection will be notifying all its customers this week of our new IntelliGantt line of products. The MS Project Add-In is already receiving quite a bit of interest. I think the Internet Workgroup will capture interest as well, provided we explain and present it well.

Which will be my task. I'm looking at creating several screencasts this week. If a picture says a thousand words, then a screencast conveys a user manual!

The IntelliGantt screencasts will be here. The MS Project Add-In screenshots will be here.

And one packaging note: We have decided to bundle the MS Project Add-In with IntelliGantt plus. For $549, this is an insane deal. You get an Add-In for MS Project, you get IntelliGantt Plus which has even more functionality (synchronizing with MS Project summary tasks) AND you get MindManager synchronization.

Your project manager will thank you!

What Digg Taught Me About Attention

Alex Iskold wrote an interesting piece at my favorite blog ReadWriteWeb the other day called "The Attention Economy: An Overview". It's well written, cogent and backed by solid analysis-- as usual. For me the take away quote is this:

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.

Quite unexpectedly, I managed to prove Alex's hypothesis this morning. The test case is the blog post right before this one. The one with the pretty picture. Fire Rainbow.

Now this here blog is more of a business blog. You'll notice that if you go to TeamDirection, the corporate blog at the footer of every page is in fact this one. Generally I tailor the content as such. But every now and then I like to put in something fun or unusual-- maybe even funny. I figure blogging is a good tool for people to find TeamDirection and come to know our products.

So I got this really cool picture and I thought:

A) That is amazing
B) Other people would like to see it
C) Amazing pictures often do very well on Digg.

Up to Digg it went. And it got Dugg.

If you enjoy watching the hit counter spin, then this experience is for you. Project Management is typically a workweek topic, so the weekends tend to be quiet at ye olde blogge. But as I type this, Fire Rainbow has managed 1667 diggs. This translates to, at this moment:


7 1/2 Hours of Digging
74,807 Page Views
65,382 Unique Visitors

Given that the purpose of this blog is to talk about TeamDirection, Project Management and our new IntelliGantt line of products one would have to think some number would click to the company site. Even if by accident (falling on the mouse, dog pawing at the owner for a walk, momentary loss of motor control, etc..), some number would click through.

Well, some number did. And that number is ........ 9.

Yes, 9.

Out of 65,382 visitors.

As Alex said:

As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.

Consider this experience the proof. QED