Project Management

Microsoft Outlook is a great tool for organizing your emails, contacts, tasks, appointment and a heck of a lot of other stuff. MissingLink adds that extra functionality which allows you to manage and coordinate your projects.

In this article I will explain how you set up MissingLink Professional to allow you to collaborate and share your project data with other members of your team. MissingLink Professional works best in a LAN environment, which for most non-technical users can be described as people you share an office with.

You’ll need to have a bit of technical knowledge around setting up a network share but that should be about it. In this scenario, I’ll describe how three fictional users, Gary, Joan and Steve, can connect MissingLink Professional in their office and work together to share project data.

Setting Up the Server

1. Each users must install MissingLink Professional on their PC.
2. Although MissingLink Professional can share data in a peer to peer capacity, it is best to decide that one user will become the “server” and it will be their MissingLink database that contains the project data. In this case, Gary’s instance of MissingLink will be our “server”.
3. Gary must create a network share on his computer. (Now for the technical part). Gary opens up his Windows Explorer and navigates to his C: drive. He creates a folder on his computer named “MissingLink DB”. In his Windows Explorer he see the following: “C:\MissingLink DB”. Gary then presses his right-mouse button on the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder and goes to “Sharing and Security”. From there, Gary select the “Share this folder on the network” check box and sets the share name to MissingLink DB.
4. Gary now runs Microsoft Outlook and needs to “move” his MissingLink database to the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder that he create in step #3.
5. On the MissingLink Toolbar (Outlok 2003/2007) or the MissingLink Ribbon (Outlook 2010), Gary selects to bring up the MissingLink Dashboard.
6. Gary then presses the right-mouse button on his Project tree and goes to the Database option.



7. Gary then selects the “Move Database Location” option



8. Gary will then be prompted with the “Browse For Folder” dialog and he navigates to the “C:\MissingLink DB” folder that he created in step #3.



9. When he has completed the move he should see the following successful message.

Setting Up Users

At this point, Gary’s work is almost complete, he needs to setup MissingLink User Accounts for both Joan and Steve. To setup Users, Gary needs to do the following:

1. If Gary was running Outlook 2003/2007 he would go the MissingLink menu item and select Database Users. In Outlook 2010, Gary would select it via the MissingLink Ribbon



2. Gary then needs to go through and add both Joan and Steve to the database.



3. It is important at this point to note that there is one more step to enable access for users. When a project is created, the “Users” tab will indicate which users can access the project.

Connecting Users to MissingLink

At this point, most of the hard work is complete. Now Joan and Steve need to “Connect” their local instances MissingLink to Gary’s MissingLink. Both Joan and Steve will follow these steps:

1. From the MissingLink Dashboard, press the right-mouse button on the Project tree to bring up the Database option.



2. From the Database option, select the Connect item.



3. You will then be prompted with standard Window dialog Open. This is where things will also get a little technical. You need to know what Gary’s PC name is. For the sake of this article, we’ll call it Gary. To figure out what your PC name is you’ll need to go to your PC Properties and the Computer Name tab



4. You’ll then type in the network share that Gary created in Step #3 of “Creating the Server”. For the sake of this article, it will look like the following \\Gary\MissingLink DB and in the Share, you should see Gary’s MissingLink database. If you select that database and press the Open button, you should be prompted with a login to MissingLink.



5. Here is where you would enter the User ID and Password information that was set up previously. Clicking on the Login button will connect to the MissingLink Database on Gary’s PC and allow Joan, Steve and Gary to all work together to collaborate and share project data.

Something to note:

• MissingLink will remember the database connection information so you shouldn’t have to re-login every day or re-connect to the remote database.

Hopefully this article clarifies and explains how to set up MissingLink Professional in a network environment. If you have any questions, please drop me an email to kevin at missinglinkprojectcenter dot com.

Kevin

Over the course of the last few days, I’ve been thinking about what I do for a living, actually more to the point, what I tell people that I do for a living. As I thought more and more about that topic, it occurred to me that some people might not have a clear idea what a I, as a Project Manager, do and thus the idea for this article was born.

I was trying to come up with a clear description of what I do for a living and it seemed to me that the best way to explain what I do was to present a clear analogy that people can relate to. I think that one of the clearest representation of what a Project Manager does would be the Captain of a ship.

A Captain you see is ultimately responsible for the boat and all of its contents. Similarly a Project Manager is ultimately responsible for the successful completion of the project. A ship’s Captain must know how every aspect of the ship operates, he or she, doesn’t need to be an expert in everything but the Captain must have a clear understanding of how things work together. A Project Manager needs to understand the various inter-dependencies of the project they are working on. This point, I feel, is critical and often overlooked.

There is a large range of ship Captains, from small pleasure boats to large ocean faring cruise ships and there is also a large range of Project Managers from small one-man shop to large 100+ person teams.

A point I’d like to make also is that I believe a Project Manager must have experience in niche that he or she is managing. It would be similar in that you wouldn’t expect someone with experience taking their pleasure boat out for the weekend to captain a large ocean faring cruise ship. The skill set isn’t appropriate and I think it is set up for failure. You must have relevant experience to the project at hand.

At the heart of what you need for an accomplished Captain or Project Manager is the ability to organize and communicate, those two characteristics are critical for the successful completion of a voyage or the successful delivery of a project.

I hope you’ve found this article interesting, even if you haven’t I’d like to hear from you!

Kevin

PS. I’ve written a tool that helps with the organization aspect of Project Management, MissingLink Project Center is the Easiest Project Management Tool for Microsoft Outlook