I’ve used several versions of Microsoft Office Project over the years, and though it has improved, it still requires Microsoft Windows. Always on the lookout for a strong project management entry in the Macintosh market, I believe I’ve found two: OmniPlan and Merlin2.
If you want to create ‘logical, manageable project plans with Gantt charts, schedules, summaries, milestones, and critical paths’, on your Macintosh, OminPlan might be a good choice. It sports a Macintosh user-friendly interface and comes from the same company that developed the great Visio compatible diagramming application OmniGraffle.
Merlin2 is a second generation project management tool for the Macintosh. Despite its marketing claiming ‘project management with a bit of magic’, it appears to be a high-end tool. Though less approachable than OmniPlan, it may be more capable. In addition to traditional project management tools, Merlin2 adds document management for administrative or organizational files. Merlin2 supports Agile Project Management methods and provides a ‘Library’ to define, store, and reuse plan activities:
+ Define your iterations just once, then drag and drop this into the Library.
+ Now you can easily drag this iteration out of the Library and drop it onto any required position in your project.
+ All the attributes of the activities, even the allocated resources, costs, and other information do not need to be entered again.
A disappointment (I share with many) is the lack of support for collaboration. These tools are quite capable of creating documents for meetings and reports, though less capable communicating with team members. Collaboration is described as ‘importing and exporting popular formats’. Merlin2 allows publishing reports to WebDAV servers. For example, calendar events could be published to WebDAV servers and subscribed to by members.
This top down push produces static documents the team can read. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to allow team members to participate in creation, curation, and execution of the plan? This appears beyond the scope of current tools.
When we posed the question to The Omni Group, we received an immediate and encouraging response:
OmniPlan doesn’t have any network collaboration features right now because for version 1, we really wanted to focus on getting the core features and functionality working well before we added any additional complexities.
A lot of users have requested this network collaboration, so we are definitely considering all the possible ways to implement this feature in a later version of OmniPlan. I’ll add a vote to this request in our database for you.
If you have any other questions or suggestions about OmniPlan, please let us know. We really appreciate it!
Sincerely,
Aaron Kwong
Support Ninja
The Omni Group
The Merlin support-team responded:
As Merlin 2 is currently a single-user license this is indeed the current workflow. You can also place Merlin on a common server where your team can access the projects however, only one person at a time can open, view and edit it. You will be glad to hear that we are working on a multi-user function, which will allow teams to work in a network environment. This is planned for implementation by the end of summer 2007.
Furthermore, we are also developing a web module, which will allow people to access the project and edit it over the web. This will be a separate module and we hope to have in released within this year.
If you have any further queries regarding Merlin just drop us an email. We’ll be glad to help.
Best regards from Germany,
Merlin Support-Team
Encouraging!
That said, both tools presently integrate into the Macintosh desktop, communicating with iCal and AddressBook. One will support the development of our data center migration plan. I’ll let you know when I choose and why.
I’d be interested to hear if you have any experience with these tools.
Like your group, we recently went shopping for a project management solution that was Mac-friendly. But where I think we diverge is that we do not like products that are Mac-centric; we prefer web apps (or when not available, apps that otherwise have both Mac and Windows versions). We like the web apps for cross-platform compatibility (our players are not all necessary Mac-users), and we also like the inherent accessibility anywhere and everywhere. To support access beyond the Univesity, where for a team members always off campus, or for those of us who telecommute.
We chose Copper Project for several reasons: it is robust, simple and elegant rather than obtuse and unnecessarily complicated, and—we pleasantly discovered—already offered on campus for free by the friendly folks in CLA-OIT.
It also seems to make most, if not all, data available in standard/accessible formats like XML. Not sure about all of its calendering and file management strengths and weaknesses yet—I’m sure it’s not a holy grail solution. But in my opinion, project management should be a very open environment, otherwise someone on the team may be shut out, and that’s never going to contribute to positive morale.
I prefer open tools that allow contributions by all members of the team. Cross-platform compatibility and network accessibility are required for larger modern projects with multiple and distributed collaborators. These deficits make traditional tools decreasingly attractive. This prompted an Email to Omni Group and Merlin support. Their responses are cited.
Our current project is smaller and more traditional in nature. The time horizon is short and the group is small. Initial evaluation shows OmniPlan and Merlin2 to be contenders on our supported platform. It is likely we will choose one of these tools, despite their collaboration deficits.
When we require tools for larger distributed projects, I look forward to reviewing Copper Project. Thanks for the pointer!