OmniPlan 2.0 beta
What's new in OmniPlan 2: No Pain, All Gain
OmniPlan 2 is the same painless project management you've come to expect with loads of new features—including over-the-air collaboration.
Click here to see the latest beta change notes.
Collaboration: Sync, Publish, Edit, and Track Changes
Use a WebDAV server to sync your projects between resources. Then, publish your tasks automatically upon saving. Grab new changes via Bonjour or at a specified interval. (You can also publish and update manually, of course.) Publish tasks and pull in updates from a server-based calendar. Export your plan automatically in any supported format. Execute custom AppleScripts from within the app.
Use Apple's Calendar Server to pull in free times and busy times for your resources. Import vacation and holiday schedules from a web-hosted calendar. Configure to check for updates periodically or via Bonjour.
Keep track of the changes to the project with visual change tracking. See your own edits on a personal project or see the synced changes on a team project. Accept and reject changes on a task-by-task basis or all at once.
Scheduling
Fiscal years are now supported in addition to calendar years so you can choose whether your tasks are due in Q2 or Spring. Schedule projects backwards from a fixed end date. Create, save, and compare your projects against multiple baselines. Highlight the critical path to individual milestones in the new Project: Milestones inspector. Resource schedules now have a start and/or end date.
Tasks and Resources
Split your tasks to schedule around interruptions. Create hammock tasks that have start and end dates based on prerequisites that you define. Effort and Duration can now be unlinked. Default task and resource attributes can be configured per project or in a template for faster task creation. Color-code tasks based on their resource. Choose independent display formats for duration and effort values.
Filtering
Save multiple, commonly-used filters for quick re-use later. Configure publishing actions to use filters.
Printing Options
Headers and footers are now more flexible. Expand or collapse all notes and task and resource groups. Page margins support mirroring on facing pages. Customize the margin above and below the header and footer.
Set Up Sync
To set up sync, select Configure Publishing & Subscriptions from the Project menu. From there, can click the plus button to add a sync type and then choose how you would like to sync your project. To sync your entire project, choose entire plan with the OmniPlan server repository. From here, you can create an account by selecting New Account from the drop down menu, followed by the Account Info button and entering the type of server along with your credentials.
Read on for improvements made since the launch of the beta on April 26, 2011.
OmniPlan 2.0 beta - June 22, 2011
- Hours per crash now stand at just over 9,000.
- Fixed 5 more crashers.
- Added support for full screen mode and hidden scroll bars in Lion.
- If a splitview is collapsed when your file is saved, it will stay that way when opened.
- It looks like we've been losing your task and resource prototypes for the last few months. Fixed that. Sorry!
- A locked task will now remain a fixed interval from the project start if the project is changed back and forth from undetermined to specific dates.
- If you modify the normal working hours in a project with undetermined dates, the date headers now refresh appropriately.
- AppleScript “get title of project” now returns whatever the Project: Information inspector says, rather than missing value if the title is implicit.
- Accessing color properties of projects via AppleScript no longer generates errors.
- HTML Full Reports preserve files in the output directory that may already exist. This is intended to better support subversion and CVS.
- The default column title style is now 13 pt.
- Fixed a bug where task outline view headers would not be displayed when a project is opened showing the resource or calendar view.
- Splitting ALAP tasks now behaves better.
- Further splits to already split tasks are now being change tracked correctly.
- We now set the project start date on imported .csv files better.
- Better handling of http redirects from WebDAV servers.
- More rendering fixes to printouts and image exports
- Fixed formatting problems in the HTML task and resource reports
- We no longer try to import WBS number from OmniOutliner columns. The WBS number is inherent to the hierarchy.
- CSV export now insists on emiting WBS numbers rather than flat, since they are required to preserve hierarchy.
- If effort conversion factors are changed in the Project: Unit Conversions inspector, values in the outline view refresh.
- As material resources are added to tasks, the Units column now refreshes.
- Resource groups no longer add available staff and material units nonsensically. If a group containing both staff and material resources is assigned to a task, the task no longer changes duration according to the incorrect units value.
- Added filtering on planned start/end. Fixed broken filters based on start/end variance.
OmniPlan 2.0 beta - June 1, 2011
- Crashes have dropped from 1 crash per 1,500 hours of use in the May 9 release to approximately 1 per 7,000 hours.
- Fixed 16 more distinct crashers.
- Fixed memory leaks.
- By default, OmniPlan will now check for updates daily instead of weekly to get these fixes out faster. The default will change back in our first release candidate.
- Started work on compatibility with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).
- Microsoft Project allows tasks to begin before the project start date, which OmniPlan normally does not. This condition is now preserved on import.
- The headers & footers textfields for pages that are not customized now display the master page settings. Disused custom headings are retained and can be turned back on.
- Turning customized headers & footers on and off now redraws the print preview.
- Exports to the old OmniPlan format now get no QuickLook preview rather than a 2.0 style rendering.
- The violations count in the document window's status bar is now correct when the document loads.
- ALAP tasks starting before their start constraints now get badged with a violation.
- Deleting a task while hovering over it in the Gantt view now updates the hover effects.
- We no longer switch to the horizontal resize cursor when dragging a task horizontally in the Gantt & Timeline views.
- Undoing a drag which superseded a leveled-start restores the task to its prior date.
- Enabling any critical path in the Project: Milestones inspector now turns on rendering of the critical path in the Gantt view. Conversely, if you turn them all off, the toolbar item gets turned off.
- Changing the color of a critical path on the Project: Milestones inspector no longer changes the text color of any selected rows as well.
- Filtering for tasks on the critical path now works even if rendering of critical paths is disabled.
- Renaming a resource now refreshes the "Assigned" column in the task outline view.
- As resources are added and removed from a resource group, the group's total Units refreshes in the resource outline view.
- Schedule exceptions added to the beginning of the first day of the week no longer vanish immediately.
- Using the Structure -> Move commands via keyboard shortcut while editing a value in the outline views properly moves the item now.
- When a new row is added to the an outline view it is now correctly scrolled to become fully visible and the field editor appears in the proper place.
- The divider splitting document windows now repositions better when the window changes sizes.
- Fixed rendering artifacts in dependency lines and baseline/split views.
- In printing and image exports, the Gantt date headers no longer overdraw the task outline view headers. There is now a vertical separator between views.
- Added "subscribe to iCal calendar for offtime/overtime" update action.
- Added option for calendar subscriptions (via iCal or web calendars) to create overtime rather than offtime.
- Attachment references are now preserved by publishing. Note that the files referred to are external to the plan and are not synched.
- Change tracking and syncing now catch assignments to material resources.
- Fixed an incorrectly calculated start date when you switch a task to ALAP scheduling.
- Rejecting a Structure -> Group command now ungroups any children rather than deleting them.
- Changed the way passwords are stored in the keychain, so that descriptions and account names in Keychain Access.app are more user friendly
- Disabled verbose logging during plan syncing.
- Splitting a previously split task now splits the last segment of it.
- Rejecting a change assigning a resource to a split task now reverts the assignment correctly.
- Changing a resource's type effectively invalidates any prior changes to it, which will no longer be displayed.
- Change tracking bubbles for resources now use appropriately formatted values (percentages, dollars, “Staff” vs. “Material” and so on).
OmniPlan 2.0 beta - May 9, 2011
- Beta testers have been averaging about 1 crash per 1,500 hours of use so far.
- Fixed 17 of the most commonly reported crashers. Please keeps those cards & letters coming, folks (preferably with a hint at how to reproduce the problem).
- Fixed memory leaks.
- Improved usability of the cropping view on the print panel
- Made the components of Gantt bars knit together better both on screen and in image exports and printouts.
- We highlight mouse handles on Gantt bars when the mouse is over them.
- When dragging tasks left & right in the timeline view, the tasks now stay in the same position relative to the mouse, rather than moving up and down between lanes
- When resizing the main document window or disclosing the changes view, the outline view now remains the same size if possible
- When tasks are filtered, groups that neither survive the filter nor have descendents that do will now be filtered out as designed.
- Changes to custom data columns now sync correctly.
- Fixed incorrect summaries of assignments in HTML exports.
- Read only values (such as # violations) are now not editable on the Gantt chart.
- When editing work schedules, we no longer get overlapping schedule blocks within the same schedule 'scope'.
- Tasks are now leveled in priority and positional order, disregarding ASAP vs. ALAP, providing better waterfalling and better preferential fit.
- Exporting a full HTML report as a publishing action now honors the template setting.
- Tasks imported from Microsoft Project files that start before the project start date will now preserve their start date.
- Removed "If-Not-Match" header from WebDAV MKCOL during initial publish, which was a gray area in the spec and caused spurious failures on some WebDAV servers. Checking for pre-existence handled via result codes instead.