If the site of a Gantt chart makes you run through the plate glass window it’s taped to, you’re not alone. Often the faux project management appearance of multiple tasks, color-coded by personnel and priority, fraught with the markings of yellow, pink and chartreuse highlighter to show the importance of one item over another, gives warm fuzzies to management but strikes horror and disbelief into the staff. If used correctly, however, they can be powerful tools. You’ve seen TeamPlatform and their web-based project management tool before. It’s the most complete project management suite we’ve seen thus far, and they’ve just added a task system to make it even more complete. A task system that makes Microsoft Project look quaint and archaic by comparison.

TeamPlatform Gantt slam

teamplatform-gantt-cover
I’m not a big Gantt chart fan AT ALL. That mostly comes from having been a Microsoft Project administrator–lining up bids, schedules and personnel to sync up with tasks, capacity and milestones. *shiver* The day we hired someone to do it full time (FULL TIME!) was a happy day for me. That was a few years ago. At the time, I looked into web-based solutions, but of course, there was nothing that would sync up our folder-based PDM system or allow task management.

TeamPlatform not only makes web-based file syncing and task management possible, they’re linking the two together in convenient workspaces that allow complete organization of your project. So, 3D files and items on your computer correspond to the same files you see linked to across the TeamPlatform interface (workspace, task list, comments, etc.), files that can be opened and viewed within the browser.

If you’ve used Gantt chart software, like Microsoft Project, there’s just a lot of frustration in getting tasks to line up and even more frustrating when you’ve got it all pretty and a change is required. TeamPlatform seems to address a lot of these pain points with a more fluid interface, drag-and-drop functionality, a slick auto-complete commenting system and of course, linking between it all.

While I still abhor spending days and months putting together Gannt charts that inevitably change, it’s nice to see a web-based options that cuts down the time it takes to complete. Oh, one thing I absolutely love is the ability to see a calendar view of all the tasks. Very handy, although it would be nice to add task via that interface as well.

Images below take you through the process of using TeamPlatform and the task view pane. Video below is a quick overview of the Gantt chart interface. Project magangment… it may all sounds pretty boring I’m sure, but if you’ve ever needed a high level of program management, I just don’t see leaving TeamPlatform out of the line-up.

Press Release / Click to expand

TeamPlatform Adds Online Gantt Chart and Contextual Hyperlink Tool Facilitating Product Design Project Execution

3/12/2013 – VisPower Technology, a leading provider of on-demand project management software for product design and engineering companies, today announced the immediate availability of its Gantt chart based project scheduling and execution feature set. This addition enables distributed design and engineering teams to manage and execute projects in TeamPlatform’s integrated CAD design collaboration environment. Keeping ease-of-use as the primary user interface design principle, the enhancement provides all essential Gantt chart functionalities which allows project managers to set up multiple dependencies among tasks, assign tasks to engineers, and mark milestones, entirely within a Web browser.

When using the enhancement in a typical project cycle, engineers receive email notifications when a new task is assigned or other dependent tasks are finished which streamlines the execution of projects. When an engineer updates the status of tasks or working-hours data, TeamPlatform automatically calculates entire project progress, which is ensuring every project member is on the same page throughout the project lifetime. To foster timely team collaboration, a discussion thread is also available for each task. Finally, A project manager can export all the project data in an Excel spreadsheet containing a snapshot of all schedules, tasks, working hours, related files and their metadata.

Simultaneous with the Gantt announcement, TeamPlatform newly provides a simple-to-use feature to create contextual hyperlinks called “@mention”. By typing the character @ followed by a keyword in any discussion thread, TeamPlatform searches for files and tasks across all team workspaces and promptly lists matches. When a searched item is chosen, bi-directional hyperlinks are automatically generated. This powerful feature enables users to easily organize a massive amount of content like CAD data, documents, and project tasks and manage them entirely inside TeamPlatform.

“@mention is already widely used interface in social networking sites and we believe this simple and flexible tool works very effectively when managing CAD design or engineering projects together with a huge amount of design files and documents”, said Simon Bae, the CEO of VisPower Technology. “Since we first released TeamPlatform last year, we have strived to evolved from much more than an online CAD document sharing tool and have become a complete online engineering project management platform. We are committed to constantly upgrade TeamPlatform in order to help our customers achieve a new level of productivity by taking advantage of the state-of-the-art Web and cloud technologies focused on the engineering, product development and 3D professionals.”

Existing features support seamless and automated workflows for executing product design projects:

  • Template based new workspace creation, which populates pre-defined Gantt chart, folder structures, and user permissions in a single click.
  • Desktop application automatically synchronizes TeamPlatform workspace files with desktop folders and files.
  • Online preview supporting 150+ file formats including native CAD files
  • CAD assembly dependency tracking
  • Search including indexing of CAD metadata
  • Team member and guest administration

Video & Release Overview
2-minute video and enhancement overview available here:
https://www.teamplatform.com/overview/project-collaboraton/

About TeamPlatform
TeamPlatform enhances business collaboration for Product Designers, Engineers and Manufacturers by providing on-demand, secure web-based platforms which enable a new and better way to work together on projects and 3D data.

About VisPower Technology
Vispower Technology, a privately held company based in Sunnyvale CA, has developed TeamPlatform and 3DFile.io with the goal of helping product design, engineering services and manufacturing companies get projects done more quickly and easily.

Author

Josh is founder and editor at SolidSmack.com, founder at Aimsift Inc., and co-founder of EvD Media. He is involved in engineering, design, visualization, the technology making it happen, and the content developed around it. He is a SolidWorks Certified Professional and excels at falling awkwardly.