The Best Way to Share Project Plans
In the past I’ve always planned software development projects with Microsoft Project - but only for producing nice Gantt charts to show tasks and the dependencies between them and never really for resource planning (I always found it over complicated).
The snag with MS Project though was that it was hard to share project plans with team members who didn’t have their own copy of MS Project. The easiest way to do it was to copy the Gantt chart view to a .gif or .jpeg and then email it to people. It worked but of course it was only a read-only snapshot and it was out of date as soon as the plan changed (mine changed a lot).
We’ve just started using Smartsheet on a new project and so far I’m impressed. Creating a project plan and sharing it with other members of the team seems pretty easy and it feels like it’s got just enough functionality to make it worthwhile without being too complicated. It's very collaborative and I like the way you can attach documents to individual tasks and then share them. Find out more about SmartSheet
