I’m indifferent to the idea of OmniFocus and OmniPlan integration. I don’t know how important OmniFocus ↔ OmniPlan integration is in the overall scheme of things.
I’ve encountered this in a previous job. The project manager insisted we use Asana to coordinate the tasks and delegation. When I receive a task from the project manager in Asana, it might say something like:
Prepare Summer Marketing Campaign
Requirements: [list of all the results that are expected]
Due Date: [end of the week]
The project manager never cared what each team member used for their personal task manager. She just said “let’s start this week’s sprint and evaluate at the end of the week.”
I used OmniFocus. I had a teammate use Trello. Another was a Todoist user. And yet another used BuJo. Nobody cared what the other person was using for personal task management. As long as they got it done. Then they returned back to Asana and checked it off and transmitted the deliverables to the required destination.
If the supervisor is using OmniPlan, I’ll imagine that a task or assignment will be pushed to me. I have my sprint requirements and the due date. Then I create an OmniFocus project and outline the next actions my way. My teammate might create the same project differently. The project manager may not want to see all the fiddly details (my next actions in OmniFocus) unless they are a micro-manager. The weekly sprint’s requirements were already detailed (hopefully at enough detail for me to understand what needs to be done).
I have enough teammates that don’t use a Mac or OmniFocus. They’re comfortable with their own task manager. The project manager might be using OmniPlan but they wouldn’t care if each team member used OmniFocus or not. I don’t know how high up the priority the OmniPlan ↔ OmniFocus integration is.
But then again, this is just my opinion. Flame away…
I agree with the knowledgeable @wilsonng, but I think the option to integrate the 2 apps may be beneficial in certain use cases. I also believe the omni folks wouldn’t consider it at all unless they saw value in the prospect, and knowing Omni, they will make a great job of the integration. It won’t be for all, but I am excited at the prospect of continuing the conclusion of projects between the 2 best management apps I’ve used for some years!
We had a Gantt style calendars integration in OF v2. I personally never used it and found it unhelpful, and subsequently prefer the interleaved style calendars integration in v3. That’s not to say it could not be implemented in a better way by Omni.
I think the clear separation between OF and OP is great with the possibility of easy transference and real time updating of projects, where and when desired.
Just how Omni are going to accomplish this I don’t know. But I have every confidence they will, and with style.
Just to be clear - I did not say that or anything like it. I simply asked a question.
But, to play that game, yes, I am saying that. I’m a practising project manager and I use both Omnifocus and Omniplan. I bought them for different purposes and that’s how I use them. For me, integration between the two would be a convenience, but not more. I am aware that other people would get greater value from it, and I have always supported the idea.
Your argument is that the lack of integration is a serious and embarrassing flaw and that it would be widely used. My question, which is still my question, is whether you think that there is a large population of users that would pay the extra cost of Omniplan to add it to their task management toolbox. It’s a genuine question. Since I already have both, I’m not in the group who might.
Please contact me either here or in the Curio group when you have problems. I made a few adjustments to the script some time ago to tweak its robustness. I imagine that I should post an update.
There are two big new features that remain from January’s roadmap, and both have to do with collaboration in OmniFocus: sharing linked tasks in OmniFocus, and sharing linked tasks between OmniFocus and OmniPlan. We’ve been hard at work at designing and implementing these, and as we’ve gotten deeper into this work we’ve decided to set our sights higher. Our original plan was to simply enable the sharing of individual tasks with one other person, but as we’ve thought through the various way people will want to collaborate we’ve decided it’s important to support sharing entire projects with teams right out of the gate.
