Re: MS Project import/export

[Francisco Moraes <fmoraes nc rr com>]

Victor wrote:
> Hello, Planner developers,
>
> I would like to talk about MS Project import/export in Planner.
> This topic has been started one day:
> http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/planner-dev/2004-May/002065.html
>
> But seems that there was no interest in this feature in 2004.
> Let me say several words about this. I believe that this feature is
> really actual now in 2007 - with MS Project import/export Planner would
> be a strong competitor, a real alternative to MS Project, especially in
> Linux world.
>
> Yes, I see, you do not like MS Project, me too! But all business people
> want to see plans in MS Project format. Even if Planner looks great
> (it's true ;-) ) and free, business people do not want to install and
> learn something else. Useless to convince... What we can do is to
> provide a CHOICE - some people use MS Project, others may use Planner.
> It is impossible now since we have different file formats. If we could
> make import/export from/to MS Project format, everybody would be happy.
>
> Currently, this topic is being discussed in MPXJ mailing list:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=31666279&forum_id=28741
>
> Jon is going to implement Planner file support in his MPXJ Java library
> (http://mpxj.sourceforge.net).  It's a great idea! But I think also it
> would be great to have MS Project import/export in Planner itself. As I
> understand, there exist all necessary libraries to read MS Ole fiiles
> and we have MPXJ sources for reading MPP/MPX and writing MPX.
> If there are C/C++ programmers which are interested in doing this, let
> us coordinate our work with Jon and try to make Planner a nice choice
> for users! I am a Java programmer (I have done some C++ projects for
> Windows ~5 years ago) , but I will try to help where possible!
>   
I have the start of a MPXJ based import for Planner. I just didn't have 
the time to finish it. I can submit it if some wants to give it a try. 
It use the libgsf for opening the OLE based files.

Francisco