SharedPlan Connect, February 15, 2005
“When Alexander the Great
visited Diogenes and asked
whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied:
'Only
stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten
creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative
men and
women is to stand out of their light.”
John W.
Gardner
Hello everyone,
Well, this is a very big month for
SharedPlan Software. We concluded the beta test of SharedPlan
Professional Edition and released it yesterday! I want to express
my deepest appreciation to all of our beta
testers for contributing their valuable time to help make a better
product. The SharedPlan team toiled
tirelessly over the last few months to finalize the product. (I
just tried to stand out of their
light.) Special thanks to Lourdes for
her Cuban cuisine to keep everyone going…Jim really loves the
lechón
asado. And Dave, stop mining all of
the cashews out of the mixed nuts!
We also freshened up our
website
a little. The changes are not dramatic;
they were really intended to make room for Professional Edition.
It’s funny how a little freshening can turn
into a lot of work. I hope you’ll find
it informative and functional.
What is
Professional Edition All About?
At a basic level, Professional
Edition adds many features
to Personal, including multilevel, embedded project support, subproject
import
and export, editable Gantt charts, Microsoft Project® import, and more reporting
and analysis capabilities.
More importantly, the combination of
Personal and Pro form
the first step toward realizing SharedPlan Software’s original mission
to
enable more collaboration in the project management process. We
believe that the greatest likelihood of
project success occurs when the entire project team is involved in the
creation
and maintenance of the plan. Now
project managers, running Pro, can exchange tasks and subprojects with
individual contributors or small team leaders who are using
Personal. This allows the whole team to participate in
the creation and maintenance of the plan.
Promotional offer
for Pro
Please feel free to
download
and try the
Professional Edition. For our
newsletter readers, we’re offering a discount for a limited time on
Pro. From now until March 31
st, you
can purchase SharedPlan Pro for $179.95 ($20 off). To purchase
Pro, visit
www.sharedplan.com/buy.html,
and
just enter coupon code SPPROINTRO on the purchase page to receive the
newsletter discount.
If you already own SharedPlan
Personal Edition and would
like to upgrade to Pro, we will send you email with information on a
special
upgrade offer. If you haven’t seen email from us by the end of this
week please
contact us (
sales@sharedplan.com
and
include your Personal Edition license key) and we’ll get the
information to you
immediately. Remember to use the coupon
code mentioned above (SPPROINTRO) for an additional $20 off the upgrade
price.
Cool 3D Design
Software
A large portion of our audience is
in the creative community
(architecture, interior design, advertising, entertainment and the
arts), so I
thought you might want to know about another Boulder company that we
met with
recently. The company is @Last
Software, and they’re doing some very cool things in the 3D design
market. Their product, SketchUp, is the software
equivalent of sketching objects on a napkin.
I’m sure they can describe it much better than I can, but here’s an
indication of its capabilities. I am a
hobbyist woodworker (some would say “hack”), and my wife has been
asking me to
build a shelving and filing system in our home office. I
downloaded a trial version of SketchUp and,
having never touched 3D rendering software before, was able to create a
rough
model of a fairly complex design in less than an hour.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually build
anything for you, so while I am now a huge fan of Sketchup, I am still
a
hack. Check it out at
www.sketchup.com.
Prospects in
Africa
After my mention last month of a
lack of penetration on the
African continent, Werner kindly replied that he is evaluating
SharedPlan for
use planning health projects in Benin and Cote-d'Ivoire in western
Africa. I'm still searching for that illusive Antarctica
opportunity, however. I have to believe
that someone at McMurdo Station could use SharedPlan to plan her next
research
project. If anyone knows of someone
down there, have her contact me for a free copy.
Favorite Project
Resources and Articles
As always, I’d like to point you to
some interesting PM
resources. (By the way, we have started
archiving these links on our website
here.)
I assume I’ll run out of these some day, but
for now check these out:
New article:
If you register for allpm.com,
there’s an
article
there called “
Learning the Lessons of Apollo 13.” I
found it a little amusing because, although the author makes some good
points
regarding factors that contribute to a successful project, he
is
reaching a little bit by comparing an information system project to
Apollo 13’s
“story of hope, inspiration, and perseverance,” given that the mission
“came close to causing the first loss of life in space for a US
astronaut.” I would be
interested
to hear if any readers know of an IS project that went so horribly
wrong
that the result was a (near) disaster.
Please feel free to
suggest
your favorite resource so I can share it with our readers.
Thanks for reading,
Tracy
