Re: MS Project import/export

[Kurt Maute us <Kurt Maute us>]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:14:23 +0300, Victor <dreamland_skib2 mail333 com> wrote:
> Hello, Planner developers,

Hi Victor - sorry for the slow reply, I've been on a major project for the past few weeks.

> I would like to talk about MS Project import/export in Planner.
> This topic has been started one day:
> http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/planner-dev/2004-May/002065.html

One reason why I didn't pursue this further was the MS announcement that it was going to move toward xml format as their native file format for MS Office - my presumption was that the same would follow for Project (anyone know if any of this has come to pass yet?).

> But seems that there was no interest in this feature in 2004.
> Let me say several words about this. I believe that this feature is
> really actual now in 2007 - with MS Project import/export Planner would
> be a strong competitor, a real alternative to MS Project, especially in
> Linux world.

True - another way to go would be to get the windows version in really good shape and add features so there's no reason for folks on either platform to bother with MS Project at all.
 
> Yes, I see, you do not like MS Project, me too! But all business people
> want to see plans in MS Project format. Even if Planner looks great
> (it's true ;-) ) and free, business people do not want to install and
> learn something else. Useless to convince... What we can do is to
> provide a CHOICE - some people use MS Project, others may use Planner.
> It is impossible now since we have different file formats. If we could
> make import/export from/to MS Project format, everybody would be happy.

There are some other complications, though.  Some of the features of Planner aren't designed the same way as MS Project (for instance, MS Project doesn't have the concept of a day type in their calendar, so import of their calendars don't work), so compatibility will always be a problem unless we turn Planner into an MS Project clone (or offer some sort of 'compatibility mode'.

I personally don't like that idea, since it would forever limit our choices in how (and whether we should) implement new features.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for offering compatibility tools, so long as we keep our freedom and independence.  We just have to manage people's expectations about the limitations of the import/export features we provide.  Otherwise we'll be stuck in 'it doesn't work like MS' - land.
 
> Currently, this topic is being discussed in MPXJ mailing list:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=31666279&forum_id=28741
> 
> Jon is going to implement Planner file support in his MPXJ Java library
> (http://mpxj.sourceforge.net).  It's a great idea! But I think also it
> would be great to have MS Project import/export in Planner itself. As I
> understand, there exist all necessary libraries to read MS Ole fiiles
> and we have MPXJ sources for reading MPP/MPX and writing MPX.
> If there are C/C++ programmers which are interested in doing this, let
> us coordinate our work with Jon and try to make Planner a nice choice
> for users! I am a Java programmer (I have done some C++ projects for
> Windows ~5 years ago) , but I will try to help where possible!

Yeah, the best way would be to reengineer MPP import/export in libplanner natively, but it would be good to see compatibility added in MPXJ.  More options - good.  Less options - bad.  ;-)

- Kurt
Kurt Maute us