Re: Feature suggestion

A couple more ideas:

> In addtion, one could start mentioning methodologies and the adaptation of
> the tool to the user's pet one. Another huge can of worms.
> I think that one at the time is fine, but the points you make should be
> kept in mind.

I have have worked for a company that adopted the a project/task management 
system across 40,000 employees right across the world. It was the wrong 
decision. Rather than the tool being adapted to the business model, the 
business model was adapted to the tool. (Top level management were 
overwhelmed with the promises of "you could do this or you could do that".)

No one tool is going to be perfect for everybody. As you don't want to try and 
maintain twenty different versions of MrProject, the key is configurability. 
Standard users receive a standard view that works in a accepted way. For 
power users there is a text or XML file they can edit to change how the tool 
works. In this way, you can provide for the majority of potential users.

> It may be an additional positive point, but IMHO as long as Microsoft keeps
> control of the office documents formats (and if they are not dumb it will
> be forever) it will be a very steep uphill struggle for the Linux desktop.

In the medium term (the next five years or so) I think that this is a given. 
However I believe that, as Adobe showed with their Acrobat format, people 
will adopt a new technology if it serves a purpose.

The MS Office formats are ubiquitos because they are ubiquitos. They are 
definitely far from optimised and, personally, I hate receiving a 60k email 
when a 1k will suffice. 

Already a lot of people have reverse engineered Office formats. (AbiWord, 
OpenOffice, kOffice for example). There are still compatibility issues, but 
they are more than adequate for most users. Another trend (started by 
Microsoft) is that the browser is becoming the desktop. In this case, it 
doesn't matter if you send something in Word format or not, as long as the 
browser can display it.

Maybe MrProject (eventually) could export a "snapshot" in a standard browser 
supported format. (HTML, XML, SGML or whatever). Be this a sub-task list, a 
section of the gantt chart or something similar. Instant pretty pictures... 
management will love you! :)

Just my 2c.

Matt

P.S. Would love to contribute, but the last programming I did was in Fortran. 
:(

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