Improve Import

Hello,

Currently there are some limitations on the Import functionality that limits the ability to import an entire project plan. Cases where an improved import/export would be beneficial:

• Copying a Project plan from one Projeqtor server to another
• Creating templates for project plans that can be easily imported, speeding up the process of creating new plans
• Importing from Microsoft Project

The areas that the import function is weak in:

• Does not import/export dependecies
• Cannot import Child/Parent relationships from Microsoft Project

I propose to use the WBS number to assign dependencies and Child/Parent relationships with importing/exporting. This would require the following changes for the import/export functions:

Consider the following structure:

WBS	Name
1	Project One
1.1	Activity One
1.1.1	Activity One, Child One
1.1.2	Activity One, Child Two
1.2	Activity Two

A column for the WBS number would be added. The WBS number would be an abbreviated version that did not include the project digits. Referring to the above structure, for the import/export the WBS would would drop the leading 1 and would become:

WBS	Name
1	Activity One
1.1	Activity One, Child One
1.2	Activity One, Child Two
2	Activity Two

During import, the WBS would be used to assign Parent/Child relationships.

For dependencies, additional columns would be added: Predecessor WBS, Predecessor lag, Successor WBS, Successor lag.

Again, the WBS numbers used in these columns would not include any digits for the project number.

One additional change would be to consider any activity that has a duration of 0 to be considered a Milestone.

With these changes it would be much easier to create templates for project plans that will take less time to setup in Projeqtor.

Regards,
Ron

Hi,

I am aware of the templates in Projeqtor currently. However, it still takes a considerable amount of time to create them, assigning parent/child relations and dependencies is very slow within Projeqtor.

I agree that a better solution for MS Project import would be from XML. I suggested modifying the current import as I thought it would take less work and just adding a few of the features would improve the import. To address, multiple dependencies, an array of values would be used in the dependency and duration columns.

My vote is for better MS Project and Projeqtor integration, and XML does seem like that is the best approach. Knowing this is a large effort, my concern is how long it will take before this is worked on.

Regards,
Ron