Hi John,

here at finnlabs we developed an add-in for MS Project 2010. It uses the API v2 of OpenProject. We developed this add-in for a large project organization that uses MS Project for scheduling and resource management and OpenProject for requirements management, bug tracking and Scrum. So the approach is to combine the best of both worlds.

However, the long term goal is that companies do not need any proprietary software for their project management.

We are always happy about users for the add-in. If you are interested please send an email to taskconnector@finnlabs.com. We will then send you the MSI-package.

Regards
Niels

Hi Niels

Thanks - email on way.

This approach sounds very similar to the way we work.

Regards

John

Hi Niels,

I have also sent an email.

Regards

Paul

Hi Guys,

until we are done with the new website we uploaded the latest installer here:

https://www.openproject.org/projects/task-connector

We are happy about any feedback.

Regards
Niels

@Niels

Thank you so much for this connector, we are going to test it now, any news we will post a feedback,

Again, thanks!.

Best regards,
Rafael

Hello,

Here is a quick feedback.
Everything works fine except one thing that makes it difficult to use:
With some tasks, when I synchronize them, the duration and start date is changed in MS project (Even if I click only on modified task only in ms project not in open project)

I did not see any reason why only some tasks are behaving like that…
In MS project, the task duration is 40h, start 2014-10-17 and ends 2014-10-23
Same in OpenProject

I do a sync, the task in seen as new in ms project and old in openproject. If I synchronize the task, openproject information are ok for this task, but in ms project the start date is changed to 2014-10-15 (and duration is computed automatically to 56h)

By the way, this task is part of a bigger task that starts the 2014-10-15…

I continue the investigation….

ok, seems like all tasks that have leveling data are impacted.

I will do some more tests to see

Are the tasks set to auto-scheduling or to be manually scheduled?

If it is auto scheduled: What is its scheduling mode? (e.g. as soon as possible, as late as possible etc.)

Best regards
Jan

They are auto, as soon as possible, no deadline, no predescessor nor a following task

ok, so after some more tests with 2 simple tasks (assigned to me, task 2 is leveled) + 1 master task that includes the other 2, I reproduced the problem (but I still do not understand why)

One way to reproduce the issue at 100% is by changing the task 2’s start date in openproject and sync to ms project.
The start date is“reset” to the begining of the master task

If I modify the end date, the end date is properly applied, but the start date is again reset. In that case the duration is also changed

Using manual mode seems to work….

So maybe the best solution is to create new task in auto mode for scheduling, then sync them to openproject to add them and then switch them to manual mode…

I will definitely have a look into this…
Problem is that Project does some automatic “corrections” when our Add-In tries to set the dates of auto-scheduled tasks.

Also it is not quite clear which semantics it has to change the date of an automatically scheduled task. Should it become manually scheduled? After all setting a date, means that the automatic scheduling was overridden…
However, I see that there are currently problems in setting the date, that are obviously unwanted behaviour.

Best regards
Jan

in ms project, if you set a date, the task stays in automatic mode but is added a constraint…

But it make sense to switch to manual mode if the date is changed. But only if the date is changed I think

Hello,

I’ve found an other bug : synchronization of “summary” tasks.

If I add a subtask with a end date higher than the summary task for example, ms project will automatically compute the end date of the sum up task.

If I synchronize, the task is created, and the summary task is updated. But summary tasks in openproject cannot be edited, start and end date are automatically computed.

I end up with a synchronization miss-match : It complains about end date is different from earlier end date… and I cannot check the task anymore without modifying manually the end date of the task in ms project to match the expected end date.

Isn’t it better to let the user select overwrite openproject or overwrite msproject option in that case?