Re: Idea for exporter creating gantt with Simile Timelines

[Rolf Kleef <rolf drostan org>]

Hi Maurice, Laurent,

A late follow-up. I neglected to catch up with this list for a while, but 
after spending a few hours wrestling with a project plan in a spreadsheet, 
I feel like adding my 2 cents here:

1) Stand-alone report

For me, the report doesn't have to be close in appearance to the Planner 
windows. The report goes to people who don't have Planner usualy.

The Simile version definitely adds value in terms of letting team members 
navigate the plan as well, and currently offers a timeline per person.

It would be great to also have a "workload per week, per person" report 
(and even a view like that in Planner itself). The Resource Usage view 
shows it as a Gantt chart, but then it's hard to see how many hours it 
actually is.

2) Calendar integration

I'd *LOVE* to have a translation of Planner data for a specific resource 
(for instance: me) available as ICS or similar. That way, I can first of 
all see the planning I make in my own calendar app, and I can also make it 
available to team members to plug into their calendars.

Uploading or synchronising my Planner file with a copy online that is 
translated on the fly would work fine.

I'm not really familiar yet with XSLT, and don't really have the time to 
build it myself, but would love to have this translator (and willing to put 
some money on the table to have it built). Maybe Laurent's XSLT is very 
close to that already?

          /-- Kind regards,
         /--- Rolf.




on 18/10/08 14:04 Maurice van der Pot wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 09:58:47AM +0200, Laurent Ach wrote:
> > The interest of the XSL I made for my Company, is that it adds support for
> > Timeline (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/) from existing XSL files I
> > integrated, and matches an organizations of tasks with a project level
> > (Planner tasks at first level) and a task level (Planner tasks at a
> > sub-level, i.e. indented once). Here is an example :
> > http://extranet.cantoche.com/tools/xsl_planner. The corresponding planner
> > file and source code are here:
> > http://extranet.cantoche.com/tools/xsl_planner/xsl_planner.tar.gz (the code
> > should be cleaned a bit). If you think it worth, I would be glad if it would
> > be integrated in Planner export.
>
>
> To anyone else listening in, now is the time to chip in with comments.
> What do you think of this?
>
>
> There's two things we need to consider. (I'm being critical here, but not in
> a negative way.)
>
> The first is that I'd like to have a clear idea of the purpose of this
> export. For instance the purpose of the existing HTML export is to
> create a self-contained representation of the plan that can be viewed by
> (almost) any browser and is as close in appearance to what you see in
> Planner as possible.
> What would make this format something that a lot of people could use?
> Is it general enough to represent any plan?
> What would be its distinguishing features besides the visually nice
> timelines?
>
> The second is the licensing. Would any simile code need to be integrated
> with Planner? I guess the answer depends on if we want the result to be
> usable off-line. I'll have to check how Gnome normally deals with the
> inclusion of BSD-licensed code.
>
> Regards,
> Maurice.