Link Milestone to Calendar Entry in e-mail client

[Rajan]

Hi,
My project calls for a periodic review with a review board. I have placed
the dates of those reviews as a milestone in the Project Plan when I first
drew it up.

Is there a means of linking the milestone dates to the calendar tool in
e-mail clients (Such as Lotus Notes) and generating an invitation?

This would help, especially when slippages from the baseline cause the
milestone dates to be moved.

Thanks

Rajan

 

[Rob Schneider]

Hi,
My project calls for a periodic review with a review board. I have placed
the dates of those reviews as a milestone in the Project Plan when I first
drew it up.

Is there a means of linking the milestone dates to the calendar tool in
e-mail clients (Such as Lotus Notes) and generating an invitation?

This would help, especially when slippages from the baseline cause the
milestone dates to be moved.

Thanks

Rajan

Rajan,

Surely using VBA you can write a small script to do this. I'm wondering
the wisdom of automating something which I would think isn't that hard
to do, e.g. send out an email to the members of the review board
informing them of the date for the next meeting.

 

[Rajan]

Rob,

Thanks for the response. You are right...this may be overkill for a one off
project. However I want to trial this first before rolling it out to another
Project which involves several reviews across various teams, projects and
stakeholders.

 

[Rob Schneider]

It's VBA then. You'll have to figure out the algorithm to establish
which tasks are "emailable" (maybe use a flag field), and then find the
code that connect Project with your email API on the desktop. You'll
also have manage the content of the email, and how you change the dates
once sent out (change is inevitable). Since you are using Notes, I
suspect that available (but it has been a very long time since I touched
Notes and have forgotten it all).

I'm guessing that with so many people involved you'll want to set the
dates and then not change them at every whim of Project forecasting new
dates for completion of the relevant milestones. If I were you I would
focus my energy on building a great, credible, and achievable plan. Then
I would set the dates for say the first two review meetings based on the
dates determined from the plan in Schedule. I would make sure these
dates are not ASAP dates. Then would publish these dates in Notes
calendars manually. I would agree that in each meeting we would agree in
the meeting the date for the next meeting, and then put that date in the
Notes calendars manually. If there are so many non-project team people
involved that it makes me want to automate this, I would think of
getting more people on the project to have the responsibility to manage
and coordinate all these people. Call me old fashioned, but I don't
think I would automate this bit. I like to automate a lot, but this
sounds too complicated and risky--because too many people are involved.