The short answer to the question is that the transitions happen badly today. The keyboard still remains the primary interface for converting off-line conversations into on-line knowledge. Of course, it isn’t really the keyboard, ultimately it’s the human that makes the conversion between the two worlds take place. That brings a good deal of fallibility to the process, but it is also what makes it inherently personal, human and social, and what makes social software so well suited to tackling the issue.

Blogs and Wikis have long been used to capture the essence of meetings and events, to make them more broadly available to the organisation – although I continue to be shocked by how few meetings are minuted, or even have actions recorded (as Penny was). Milestone Planner has made that process a habit for me – typing a line of text and clicking on an avatar is all it takes to record an action. The simple act of creating a digital record of the off-line event has a dramatic impact on the likelihood that it will be followed up and actually happen. When that action is ‘socially’ accountable – by being made visible on-line to others – the likelihood goes up even further (that’s one of the main concepts behind Milestone Planner).

The interface between on-line to off-line data has also been a narrow one. The office printer is still the main way that digital assets get back into the physical world. There is the occasional nod to the meeting room projector, that makes our PowerPoint creations appear as a fleeting flash of light, but the piles of printed paper that seem to gather by any office printer bear testament to the device’s dominant role in creating ‘real’ things from our digital machinations.

The narrow paths between on-line and off-line in the business world seem ridiculous when you look at the technology we actually have at our finger tips: Phones to capture pictures and video, or even audio, conference call systems that can record and transcribe speech, virtual world environments, speech to text software, augmented reality, … the list goes on. Many business folks are already using these tools – mostly the ones that move in social media circles I note! – but they are a tiny minority in a sea of literal monotony.

Mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, have a central role to play in smoothing the transition between the on-line and off-line lives of business data. That is partly due to the amount of technology they pack into one space, but it is one of the things to fall out of the inherently personally nature of the interface between the two worlds: Mobiles are inherently personal, privatised and individual. We keep them with us, much more than laptops, and they have a much better sense of our place and identity, through features such as GPS, and their ability to create and store video and photos that represent our daily experiences.

Unsuprisingly then, mobile devices have lead the charge in enabling better ways of switching between the two worlds. Possibly one of the most clunky ways this is happening is in the use of QR codes, little square of digital magic that can be printed, then viewed by reader software and used to jump to a web page. Though many question their usefulness, 14 million Americans in the month of July used a QR code – that’s a lot of interactions. Where do they fit into the business process? How about putting a QR code on a meeting room door, with a link to the on-line booking system, or adding them to your meeting documents to give attendees a link back to the project plan or documentation? Although they are effectively a progression from bar codes, they don’t have to be boring. The built in error correction allows marketers and designers a lot of creative freedom.

QR Codes are just one way that the divide is being bridged, there are plenty more exciting ones. On one side, virtual reality systems have been building out from the virtual world, on the other, augmented reality systems have been building out from the physical world. The main thrust of a recent Digital Surrey event at CSC’s offices was that the two will become increasingly blurred. Businesses like Layar have be creating digital layers of information over the physical world, so that you can interact with information around physical objects. You might already have seed the Arcade Fire video, that has a great example of using video and HTML 5 to create a personalised video that draws in the physical world. Another example is Blue Mars Lite, a 3D virtual world platform that draws on Google’s street view data. It enables you to gather people into a virtual space, based on a real world environment, and chat and explore that space online.

Social technology, and the developments around it, can blend on and offline, easing business processes and making them both more human, and less fallible. So much valuable business information is still transient and offline – corridor conversations, customer meetings, conference calls. The majority of that information is undiscoverable , unsearchable, and ultimately lost - those who couldn’t be right there, right then, loose the benefit of the interactions, often resulting in repeated conversations and decisions made with inaccurate or out of date knowledge. To paraphrase an old sci-fi programme: We have the technology to fix this, we can rebuild it. The barriers are not the technology any more, they are resistance to change, and a lack of application.

There is a lovely video from Microsoft doing the rounds, which paints a picture of better ways of interacting with devices:

I have to admit to being a bit disappointed to see a QWERTY keyboard in the video, but other than that, it is an exciting vision.  As Steve commented during the event “Providing a friction free way for teams to collaborate significantly increases likelihood that they will do so.” - We are already starting to experiment with the ways touch can be used to create better business applications, and in the next few weeks we’ll be adding QR code support to aspects of what we do here. There is much to be done!

A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal.

John Rusk describes how they work in his post – Agile Charts - which is over 6 years old, but still up to date today. Now, not everyone likes burn down graphs - they do have some very definite limitations. In Milestone Planner, Milestones have a status beyond just completed or open, and as we are tracking an entire project, so we have to deal with things like changes in scope (adding and removing milestones), and down the line, we also want to show the earned-value in the project (see “Earned-value and Burn Charts” by Alistair Cockburn).

Burn-up charts are the mirror image of burn-down charts, and are much better suited for charting the progress of an entire project. As the name implies, they are line an upside down version of a burn-down graph. Being the other way up let’s them display different types of status, and any changes in scope show up as changes on the top line. If you are interested, you can get more of an idea about how they compare by reading David Anderson’s “Managing with Cumulative Flow Diagrams“, or see how burn-up charts can be used to show bottlenecks in  Juurgen Appelo’s take. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an example of a burn-up graph from Milestone Planner (we call it a progress graph – didn’t wan’t to get the health and safety folk all hot under the collar with talk of fires):

But the image is only part of the picture, as it were (not doing so well with metaphors today). From left to right, we can see how the project suddenly grows in scope (number of milestones) half way through, and we can see a steady difference between work completed, in blue, and the target completion, shown as ‘missed’ in light blue. But because we track the full history of the plan, we can also show how these estimates have changed over the course of the project. Watch this video from Jim to see what we mean:

Slightly mind bending stuff, but we hope, after a little explanation, that it makes sense. As ever, the best way is to dive in and try it for yourself. You’ll need to run your project for a few weeks to really see how the progress graph works. We hope that it gives you a better view of how your project is going, and helps you stay on track!

Milestones, sorted

Firstly, the milestones page now has a lot more functionality: you can sort milestones by date (as you always could), by status (blue, green, etc…), by owner, by workstream, or by the date that they were last updated. And, of course, you can still filter by the owner and milestone status. Its pretty nippy, and very, very mobile web browser friendly. You can now slice and dice your project in all sorts of ways – sometimes a different perspective helps you see the way to move things along.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Sometimes you love to have the activity stream, and other times you don’t need it. The activity stream gives you another way to navigate around your project plan, and also allows you to see the history of each item, but sometimes you don’t need that. Now you have a choice of having it hidden or showing, by using the little tag at the top to hide it or make it re-appear. When you click to the next page, it will stay hidden or showing. You should find this useful if you are doing your planning on a smaller screen or on a tablet device.

A bit of a tidy

We’ve tidied up the layout of milestones and actions, to make them a bit easier to read, as well as fixing which actions get displayed under a milestone, according to who you are focussed on. We’ve tidied other aspects of the layout to allow it to work on smaller screens in the desktop world too.

Kanban can do

The action kanban is now also much more dynamic and shows the full set of actions, in the Professional Editon. You can view actions by person, and focus the view of actions down to a certain number of days.

Over to you…

We very much hope you enjoy the changes, and welcome your feedback and suggestions as always! Milestone Planner is now in the Google Chrome store, so if you are a Chrome user, please do leave us a review! Don’t forget to explore Milestone Planner’s other features – have you checked out the activity and status reports in the plans view, or tried the RSS and Calendar feeds?

Do Things Differently

Milestone Planner is about working more effectively, and has a very different approach (and philosophy) to ’1.0′ productivity software. Outcomes outperform activities. Purpose outperforms process. Deadlines outperform durations. Leadership and co-operation outperform command and control. Networked people outperform constraints and controls. So, what have we done? Here’s a quick video overview from Jim:

Actions over To Do’s

To Do’s are usually items without context, although good to do lists do have context, which helps to help prioritise and make sense of what’s in them. The real purpose of context is to ensure that our actions map to our goals (either personal or business). So, how are Actions in Milestone Planner different from what you might have seen with a To Do list before? Firstly, actions represent a commitment, either to yourself or someone else. Other things are fine, but they belong in a notepad or some form of idea store. Secondly, actions are created in a context –  they exist against a Milestone, inheriting it’s due date, and following it around.

Just like Milestones, Actions have an owner, but they also have a ‘supporter‘. The owner is the person who created the action. The supporter is the person it was assigned to, who is ‘supporting’ making it happen. The two may be one and the same of course. There’s nothing wrong with making and keeping commitments to yourself! Just like milestones, actions can be reassigned and edited in two clicks. If you are on a call or in a meeting, you can capture the meeting actions by clicking add action on a milestone, then simply type each action and kit enter – you don’t need to take your fingers off of the keyboard unless you want to assign them to someone else. It is super fast, enabling you to keep the flow of the meeting, and have a comprehensive action list at the end of it.

Actions have a status of  completed/done, started/in progress or not-started/backlog . This forms a basic personal kanban system, which you will see when you sign into the Milestone Planner dashboard. Kanban is something I’ve been big a fan of for a long time. If you want to know more about personal kanban, start with this presentation from Jim Benson (@ourfounder on Twitter), and check out the personal kanban site:

There have been hundreds of conversations that shaped the latest release of Milestone Planner. A huge thank you to everyone who’s taken time to speak with the SocialOptic team, dropped us emails, sent feedback or tweeted us. One conversation that stuck in my head is this one with Richard Maybury during a tvsmc meet up. I had my Zi-8 to had, so was able to catch it on camera:

Be productive, very productive! Keep the feedback coming, and thank you for inviting your friends and teams, and for keeping us healthy and growing! As we’ve been saying in the office all week: “ACTIONTASTIC!“

Milestone Dependencies in Projects

We often get asked if Milestone Planner supports dependencies. In traditional project tools you build tasks, then link them together: Task A and B have to finish before Task C can start. For projects where you know the exact sequence of tasks from the outset, then this is a really good way of planning. However, for emergent projects and projects subject to lots of change, this method can trip you up.

We’ve all been part of projects where the dependencies between tasks keep changing, as we find out more about the tasks or requirements. I suspect we’ve all also seen Project Managers spending more time trying to keep the changing dependencies in the plan up to date than actually leading the project! That said, we know that it is a real pain to have to move 20 individual milestones when the entire project has slipped by a week. So we have introduced “soft dependencies” into Milestone Planner.

In each workstream you can switch soft dependencies on or off, by clicking the icon by the workstream title. With dependencies off, you can move individual milestones by clicking and dragging, just as you always have. With dependencies in a work stream turned on, when you drag a milestone, all of the incomplete milestones after that date will move as well.

This is a super-quick way of rescheduling complete workstreams. We hope it makes Milestone Planner even easier to use, without creating any additional work.

Introducing the Hoover: Time Sweeping

Knowing where you have got to in a project, both as a team, and personally, is obviously a key piece of feedback. It is now easy to see this at a glance with Milestone Planner. There are three pieces of time information that are now visible in the timeline view:

1. Today – the vertical red bar indicates today’s date, which shows how far through the project you are in elapsed time.
2. Project Today – You’ll notice that the time line to the left is greyed out. Where this ends indicates the ‘project today’ – that is where you have got to, in terms of achieved milestones. In an ideal world this should be level with, or slightly past, today. To explain it another way, the project today is the date of the first uncomplete milestone. It represents the project progress in terms of progressed time.
3. Your Today - The yellow vertical bar indicates what we call ‘your today’, which represents the next milestone you are working towards. Just like the project today, in an ideal world this should be level with today, or slightly into the future.

Get More Done

If it all sounds a little complicated, don’t worry. It isn’t. Just create a project and try marking some milestones done, and clicking on the link-milestones buttons and moving milestones around. It is very intuitive. As you start marking milestones complete you’ll enjoy watching the project today sweeping forwards!

The eagle eyed amongst you might have picked up on our latest time related project. More on that in the next post. As a hint, if you have any time-tracking related requests, now is a good time to drop us a message via the feedback form!

The session that most stuck in my mind was ”Do The Right Thing: Building Respectful Software”, hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Gavin Bell. I caught up with Gavin at the Digital Mission stand later, which was a great chance to chat about his new book, “Building Social Web Applications” – available on Amazon UK,Amazon US, or O’Reilly. – and to talk social software.

Building web-based applications in a responsible fashion is much harder than it seems at first glance. From privacy issues, to sensible default settings, “doing the right thing” isn’t always that easy. The session was a useful chance to reflect on many of the recent changes to Milestone Planner, and where we go next, from the names used in projects, to how the RSS and calendar features work.

When we added RSS and Calendar support to Milestone Planner, we went for the most secure option available. Secure RSS feeds aren’t that common or well understood. We use them because we want to keep people’s project data as secure as we can. When you login to Milestone Planner, via the web, and choose a project and you will see an RSS Feed icon in the window. If your browser supports it, you will also see it in the menu bar. The first time you select the RSS feed, depending on your RSS reader, you will need to sign in again. From an application point of view, this is ‘the right thing to do’ as each one application uses a seperate copy of your user ID and password, so that you can control access by application. From a user perspective, it seem a little bit of a hassle, but from a security perspective, it is the right thing. The alternative is to leave RSS feeds open, or protect them via a ‘feed key’ which is publicly visible.

Once you add a project feed to your RSS reader (or email client – both OS X’s mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook can read Milestone Planner’s RSS feeds), you are good to go. You can choose to authenticate the RSS feed once or every time. The settings are controlled by your RSS reader, not Milestone Planner. Whenever someone updates a project, you will get an update via the RSS feed – very handy!

Calendars have their own interesting twist. When you click on the calendar icon in a project, it will fire the a calendar feed. This is a dynamically updated calendar, which you can sync to OS X iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird’s calendar or any app that supports the web calendar standard. Whenever a milestone moves, the calendar feed is automatically updated. Just like RSS feeds, you will need to login to the calendar feed separately. If you allow your calendar program to store the login details, you only need to do this once. Remember to set the calendar to auto-update – not all calendar clients do this by default. Even though the standard allows us to specify the default refresh time in the feed, sadly many of the Calendar applications tend to ignore this. That’s definitely not doing the right thing!

We have also added Gravatar support. If you have one, you already know what it is. Very simply, a gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar – a nice picture of you that can be used (in a project) to identify you. It is more recognisable than the email address on which it is based, and better represents the social nature of Milestone Planner. If you don’t have a gravatar Milestone Planner generates an icon for you, which you will see in the people bar at the top of the page. Setting up your own Gravatar is very straight forward.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Milestone Planner. Here is a request from us: If you see a place where you think we might have set the defaults wrong, or things could be better, let us know. Milestone Planner isn’t just a team-based tool, it’s a team effort, and we’d be very glad to have you on the team!

I’ll talk more about that in a future post. At the individual, consumer level social graphs are a map of the relationships people have, and have had. It isn’t unusual for a student entering the workplace to have thousands of contacts on Facebook. Social Graphs are big news, so when I heard that Social Media Week‘s London Partner, Chinwag, were running an event titled “Understanding Social Graph Optimization” I headed up to town.

While we aren’t about “monetizing” social graphs at SocialOptic - we’re about helping people to be more productive – for big media companies Social Graphs spell h-u-g-e o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y. The event was at the IAB‘s offices, and sponsored by instant messaging provider Meebo, and with an interesting line up for the panel:

• Antony Mayfield (Chair) – SVP Social Media, iCrossing
• Carter Brokaw, CRO, Meebo
• Ajit Jaokar, Future Text
• Vincent Sider, Head of Strategy: Social Media, Gaming & Presence, BT
• Maz Nadjm, Online Community Product Manager, BSKYB
• Trevor Johnson, Head of Strategy and Planning, EMEA – facebook

There was lots of talk about how BT is (and isn’t) using Twitter. Interestingly I’m currently having a Twitter exchange with @BTcare about an issue accessing Milestone Planner from a BT OpenZone hotspot, which they have been most helpful about. The focus was more about “leveraging the social graph” than optimising it, something that made me feel a little uneasy.

The general feeling from the panel was that users are happy to share their social graphs for providers to use, as long as it is done with their permission, and they get something back from it. However, Facebook’s Trevor Johnson said ”it’s not about monetization, it is about users.” Facebook isn’t a stranger to concerns over how data is used, and Chinwag’s Sam Michel pitched in a question about user privacy, and more specifically users’ understanding of privacy issues. It’s definitely an emerging challenge, worthy of consideration. The convestion spread to Twitter, a few quotable highlights:

@juliusduncan: Social Graph Optimisation SGO has taken over from SMO in the past 6-9 months Carter Brokaw – CRO, Meebo #smwldn

@benjaminellis: LOL, @mazi on content: “sharing is caring, but love is not free.” #smwLDN

@zoe9: #smwLDN Maz Nadjm, BSKYB says social media is a collective effort in an organisation not just for marketing.

@yay_tar: RT @juliusduncan: #smwldn ‘if you can’t get the buy in of the CEO up front, you are in trouble’ Vincent Sider, BT Strategist

The panel’s closing comments on social media contained some gems:

• BT :- It’s all about education. Create an eco system where customers can be rewarded.
• Sky :- It’s all about iteration. Test out something small and take it forward.
• Facebook :- Don’t put yourself under pressure to do something big and immediate. Iterate.
• Meeba :- Enable people to interact with content. Watch and learn, and listen, and itterate against your content.
• Future Text :- Think of what the customer wants.

So, the theme seems to be start small, learn, and grow. That’s advice that’ll go down very well here! By the way, for anyone involved in Social Media week that would like to, sign up for Milestone Planner Standard Edition and @ or DM us on twitter (@SocialOptic) for three months free Milestone Planner Professional Edition – this week only!

• Edit milestones – no more pop up box! Just click the title to change it. Click the Milestone ‘triangle’ to pop up the status chooser and select red, yellow, green or blue (completed) – or delete the milestone. It’s whizzy, you’ve got to try it!
• See the owner – click on the person icon and choose an owner for the milestone. Type a name, and click ‘invite’ to bring them into the project. If you hover over the milestone owners’s name, any milestones belonging to  that person will glow. You might want to zoom right out on the timeline for the best effect!
• Scroll Wheel Support – for those of you with mouse wheels and track pads, you can scroll up and down using them.

A Greater Sense of History

The biggest change has been to how “history” is handled. When you hover a mouse over a milestone, it will reveal the when the milestone was last updated, and what the most recent change to the milestone was – with little icons for date, owner, text update, etc – and who may the update. If you click on the “Show history” pull down, you can see more of the change history:

In the Standard Edition of Milestone Planner, you have the last few changes, in the Professional Edition you have access to the full history since the milestone was created. You’ll notice the history isn’t just what happened to the milestone (created, slipped, status change, …), it can include an explanation or comment as well.

Whenever you update a milestone, the history box will pop up and ask you for a comment. It is optional, but sometimes it is helpful to add an explanation. For example, if I slip a milestone back 5 days I might want to add a note to explain that it will be late because Dave has been stuck at home in the snow. You can also add a URL into a note, for example linking to a relevant document or an image. The link will be hyperlinked in the history view.

Conversations Around Milestones

As you see, your team can now have conversations around any milestone, interwoven with the changes to it. The conversation is kept in one place, so everyone working on the milestone can see who and what is being affected by what they are working towards. This makes it much easier to distribute the management of the project, but ensure that things still remain on track. Even users with standard access to a project (who can’t add or move milestones) can add comments.

Conversations Face to Face

That’s probably enough of a brain dump for one post! Starting next week is Social Media Week, with events all around the world  - It is going to be great (I might have a slight bias). I’ll be at Social Media Week London (event schedule here – the tickets are almost all gone) and speaking at “Social Media in Enterprises”  on at Cass Business School on Tuesday (more detail on the Business Two Zero blog) and “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday. Do come and say hello – I’m always very happy to chat about Milestone Planner!

Keep your browser warm, there’s more coming very soon!

When you next logon you’ll notice that the “Beta” button has gone. For  many services, being in perpetual beta is a fine fashion statement, but  we have a large number of users managing big projects within Milestone Planner, and we’d love more, so it’s officially time to come out of beta.

Being out of beta doesn’t mean we are perfect though – if you do see a hickup, then give us your feedback. There are so many permutations of browsers, operating systems and plugins, there there is always the occasional surprise. You’ll find we get things fixed very quickly if there is an issue, and that we are definitely still adding new functionality.

A number of users have asked us for premium features, so we’re opening that option up more broadly to users of Milestone Planner. The free service will remain as is. Create as many projects as you want and invite as many people as you need to manage the projects . The ”Professional” option adds full SSL support and full Milestone history for  users that have upgraded.

We’ll be adding in more features in the coming months, so  as an incentive to get in early, we have set up an 80% discount code, which gets you a whole year of Milestone Planner Professional for £19.80. Simply head over to the store – click “upgrade to Professional” and enter launch2009 as your discount code. If you are new to Milestone Planner, you’ll want to sign up and give it a try first. If you are upgrading an existing account, just use the same email address you normally login with and you are away.

The offer is only open to the first 200 people [a few left but only a few days left] who register after this post and before the end of december, and if you want to share the code via Twitter or via your blog, then that’s great with us [drop us an email and we'll send you a code].

If you’re a bigger business with lots of users, we have two other offers that might be of interest to you – drop us a line and we’ll tell you about them.

Open a project

Projects are the main spaces in Milestone Planner and most of the action is focused on them. Each project has a team, which can be listed by clicking “people”. That team might be just you, but there is no reason to work alone! Invite as many people as you need to and share your project plan with them.

Clicking on “My Projects” gives you an overview of the projects you are working on, and a detailed status of each one. It is also the place where you can create new projects and delete old ones.

Set your Milestones

Rather than make a project a to do list that doesn’t get done, we look at it as a series to things to be achieved on the way to completion: Milestones. Milestones mark the places you go past on your way to successfully completing the project.

Personally, I like to work backwards when I build a project plan – clicking on the striped timeline to create a final milestone at the end of the project, then adding milestones to the left of that, marking the things that lead up to it. You can add milestones in any order you like, systematically or just as you think of them. Just ensure that they are clear and achievable. The vertical red bar indicates today’s date.

Organise with Workstreams

A big project sometimes has hundreds of milestones, so grouping them together helps organise things more neatly. Even with a small project it can make sense to group milestones together – perhaps by the team that is responsible for them, or the place where they are happening. In Milestone Planner these groupings are called Workstreams and are shown as horizontal boxes. You can create as many or as few as you need, and even add a little descriptive overview for each one if you would like.

See Things Getting Done

You can mark each Milestone complete (which turns it blue) as it is achieved – or assign an owner to a milestone, invite them to the project, and they can mark it done for you. No need for emails or voicemail tennis. You can add notes to any Milestone, and in the pro version you can see a full history of all the changes since the milestone was created.

If you are going to be a little late with a milestone you can click and drag it along the time-line to it’s new target date – or perhaps delight everyone by being a little ahead of time and dragging it to the left to an earlier date.

People don’t always see the world in blue and green, so you can also switch a milestone to amber/yellow, orange or red by clicking on it. We leave it up to you and your team to choose what each means to you, but Blue always means done/complete and milestones start their lives as green triangles.

Know Exactly How Your Projects Are Doing

When you come back to a project, you will see any updated milestones highlighted with a gold star. If you want to know more about a change, just click on the milestone to see the recent changes. You can zoom in and out to choose how many weeks of the timeline you see at once, or scroll along the timeline to inspect longer projects. If things are still looking a bit cluttered, it can help to hide the milestone details for a while, using the detail toggle.

We really hope that you enjoy using Milestone Planner and are always open to hearing ways to make it a more satisfying experience. Login, or leave us a comment here, and you can send feedback at anytime from within the application itself.

Happy planning!

The hub model has the appearance of a safe, controlled, well-managed process. The reality is that it leads to people making decisions on in-accurate information, and at the speed of one bottle neck. Of course, there is a different way to do things.

The mesh model is peer-to-peer. Anyone can interact directly with anyone else. In the case of Milestone Planner, this means that anyone in the project team can go and update their milestone directly, and see the most up to date version of the plan. No trawling through emails or folders trying to find the latest-latest version.

It is a person-to-person form of management and communication (something that Scott Gould of Likeminds is blogging a fair bit about – Becoming P2P), and based on an “adult-adult” communication model, rather than the less productive “adult-child” one that so often accompanies the hub/star model. We’re aiming to make Milestone planner a grown up tool, for grown up people.

Let us know what you think.

Select a project, so you are in the main Milestone Planner time-line view:

Click on any milestone, or create a new one by clicking in a workstream – I’m going to add a new milestone in the blog posts work stream, so I’ll click there. The milestone is about this post and I’m going to assign Dave as the owner. As I type Dave’s name in the owner box, an ‘invite’ button appears:

Clicking on the invite button gives two ways to invite Dave – either with Standard Access, or with Super Access.

With “Standard Access” Dave can move and update only milestones assigned to him. “Super Access” gives Dave full access to the project, just like a project owner, including the ability to create new work streams and to invite more people to the project. I just need to enter Dave’s email address, click the invite  button and he will be emailed an invite, complete with a URL to click on.

Inviting someone without a milestone

For now, the easiest way to do this is to click on any milestone, then type the name of the person you wish to invite. Press the invite button, enter their email address and then press ‘invite’ to send the message. Now change the owner name back. This will send the new person an invite and leave the milestone untouched.

When the new user joins the project, they will be able to see the full milestone plan, but will not be able to change anything until a milestone or work stream is assigned to them – the milestones will have locks by them to indicate this:

If you have been using Milestone Planner for a while and already have lots of milestones, just click on any milestone and you will see the invite box if you have an owner name there, or if you would like to do everyone in a batch, click the people button and you will get a list of everyone on the project, and the ability to invite them.

To remove someone from a project, simply re-assign the milestones they owned (we wouldn’t want any milestones without owners!). Now click on the “people” button, find them on the list and click “remove access”. There, all done.

There are lots of other pieces of useful information in the people list, for example you can see how many workstreams and milestones each person has, and when they last updated the plan.

Do let us know how you get on, or if you have any questions!

It’s a bit like an online equivalent of the magnetic planning boards you see in some offices, and it’s nice drag-and-drop interface makes it really easy to use. It will handle multiple projects, and you can export your plans to send them to colleagues or use them in presentations or other documents.

Here is Simon Mackie‘s screencast:

WWD Screencast: MilestonePlanner from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

We’ve just enabled some extra functions you might spot next time you login – I’ll give a full run down of the new collaboration features in the next post!