GanttPoint - Project Management on SharePoint WSS3.0/MOSS

Now in Beta. Businesses using SharePoint in-house are invited to participate in our beta test. Participation is free.

What is GanttPoint?

GanttPoint is a set of tools centered around Microsoft Project and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to facilitate collaborative project management in a web-based environment. The GanttPoint solution emerged from a joint effort between Softalot LLC and TeamDirection Inc. - yet another Seattle-based project management software firm. TeamDirection may be best known for its project management tool sold as a partner solution for the Groove platform (ex-Lotus, now Microsoft). TeamDirection provides project management software under the "IntelliGantt" brand.

MS Project is the recognized standard in project management software on the desktop and does a wonderful job planning and scheduling projects. IntelliGantt provides technology to publish tasks from project plans to SharePoint task lists, and synchronizes changes made on SharePoint, such as status updates, back to the original project plan.

GanttPoint Web Parts provide consolidated views of tasks, milestones, issues, events, meetings, and custom lists for both single project sites and for multiple projects across separate project workspaces. These views include chart views, list views, and calendar views.

GanttPoint Chart with Health Status across multiple projects and GanttPoint List with milestones across multiple projects

How does it work?

A typical project starts on the desktop of a project manager using Microsoft Project. Once the initial plan is crafted and resources are assigned, the project manager can publish the task information to a SharePoint task list.

Microsoft Project Plan to be published to a SharePoint Task List using the IntelliGantt AddIn

The resulting task list on SharePoint is accessible by all team members of the project. On SharePoint, teams will also collaborate on additional information, such as issues lists, calendars, contacts, documents, discussions, etc.

GanttPoint Web Parts provide views to consolidate this information in meaningful ways and they offer several features geared towards project management. For example, there is a calculated field called [health] and it refers to deadline driven items, such as tasks and issues. Health is computed during display time (not available in standard SharePoint calculated columns) and compares the current date with the deadline at hand. Other criteria affecting “health” may include “start date” and “percent complete”. “Milestone” is another example; it’s a logical item type which is set whenever a task has zero duration. This can be used to display lists or charts concerning milestones only.

GanttPoint Web Parts also offer a Calendar view. The view is based on the standard SharePoint Calendar View control, however, it extends its capabilities to also show tasks, issues, and other date driven list types in the same consolidated view with events and meeting items.

GanttPoint Calendar View showing Tasks, Milestones, Events, Meetings, and Issues.

GanttPoint Web Parts can be used both on project level and on the root level for consolidated views across multiple projects. A popular view for team members is the consolidated tasks and issues list. To effect this view, the GanttPoint List View Web Part is configured to run from a top-level web parts page, and to collect tasks and issues assigned to the current user from all sub-sites (project workspaces).

GanttPoint List View with Tasks, Milestones, and Issues assigned to PM. Users can click on any
of the items, make changes to the item details, and upon completion return to this list view.

For more information, we recommend you also download the users' guide. If you are interested in participating in our current beta program, please send a quick email to beta@softalot.com with the following information: Your business contact information and a very brief synopsis of how you would be using our product. Please send this email from your business email account, as we use this for authentication purposes.