SharedPlan Connect
February 27, 2007
“Every Day, in Every Way, I'm Getting Better and Better.”
–Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus
Return of the Pink Panther
- SharedPlan’s Continued Improvements – you look mahvelous, dahling
- Picturing SharedPlan – a fun diversion
- A Terrific Repository Project – and a dig at MS Project
- A Failure to Communicate – Cool Hand Luke on project management
Hello,
Our Improved Look and Feel
Fernando Lamas famously told a Tonight Show audience, “It is better to look good than to feel good.” In that spirit, we continue to improve the look (and feel) of SharedPlan products.
We have just released SharedPlan ProPlanning version 3.4, which includes some very nice improvements. For instance, we've made significant updates to the interfaces in the public and private project server - next time you're in there check it out.
I really dig the clean new look.
Another terrific improvement that you requested is the ability to attach notes (think Post-Its) to the network diagram. This is a great way to quickly add informal information to a plan, either as a reminder to yourself or to other team members. Just Shift-Double-Click - here’s a brief video of Project Stickies in use.
I’m excited by what the team is doing to improve the current SharedPlan tools. Let us know what you'd like to see next - your feedback counts!
Picturing SharedPlan
Okay, this is a little odd, but strangely compelling. Yahoo! has a new feature called Pipes, which allows you to take data from one place and mash it up with data from another place (and another and another, if you want), in some kind of structured way, to get something else. Clear as mud, right?
Well, Roger got bored late one afternoon and decided to try using Pipes to create ‘pictures of SharedPlan.’ First, he pointed Pipes to the OpenPlanning repository and our various RSS feeds to grab plan and feed titles. He then squirted those titles over to the photo-sharing site, Flickr, and poured them into Flickr’s search engine to see what picture the title terms would return. Theoretically, the result should give you a series of ‘SharedPlan pictures.’
You can see the result here. We’re pretty sure this is completely useless except as a momentary diversion but if you’re in need of a diversion you might find it interesting.
My New Favorite Project
I recently noticed this project pop up on the OpenPlanning repository’s Most Popular list. As you can see, it is a very detailed plan for a software development project. The author, Sophia Germand, imported it from Microsoft Project using ProPlanning. According to Sophia:
“This is a project that I read into SharedPlan from an MS Project file. First, to test their MS Project import facility and second to begin using this in SharedPlan Pro - I'm finished with MS Project.”
That last little bit is just too perfect because I am also finished with Project.
What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
Although there’s actually no reference to Cool Hand Luke* in this article (free registration required), Sue Dyer presents results of her research into the top causes of communication breakdown on project teams, and ways to prevent or overcome them. Very useful stuff.
Until next time, thanks for reading,
Tracy
* One of my top 20 movies of all time.