General Principles of LiveProject Collaboration
Note: You will need to have LiveProject Team Viewer to share project plans,
and LiveProject Project Collaboration to collaborate.
Compare versions.
Before we start explaining Team Features in detail, it's worthwhile to provide
a big picture on how LiveProject works.
When you share documents and projects through LiveProject, they are in fact stored
on a central LiveProject Server that is typically maintained by KaDonk. This allows
all users on your account to see the files that are uploaded, and to view or download
them. Figure 1 shows an overview of the architecture.
Figure 1: How LiveProject Works
In the corner, a manager uploads a project plan he has been working with locally.
His team, which can include external partners or remote offices use LiveProject
to see the shared project. They can view it, and if using LiveProject Project
Collaboration, they can also make suggested changes to the project. These changes
are also stored on the LiveProject server, and instantly become visible to all the
LiveProject Participants.
When the Manager is ready to review the changes, he uses LiveProject to accept
or reject them. Upon completion, LiveProject updates his local project plan with
all the accepted changes, and then uploads the file to the LiveProject Server. When
that is complete, the entire team can see the changes to the project plan, including
highlights of accepted and rejected changes.
Figure 2: Project Collaboration Flow
Figure 2 illustrates the cycle of updating the local project file, publishing to the server, and reviewing team members' suggestions to the project plan. In day-to-day work, this is all automated by LiveProject. LiveProject automatically asks the manager to update, automatically updates viewers on the team members' computers, and automatically notify the manager of pending changes. It even loads and updates the Microsoft Project Plan with a single click, before publishing the new file to the server for all to see.
While Figure 2 may initially look complicated, there are really just a few things that are involved from your perspective:
- Upload the original file
- Open a viewer to see the project, and make suggestions.
- Accept and reject changes
LiveProject automatically share the suggestions, highlight changes, show notifications, upload and check for new versions of the project plan, and show new versions of the plan for the team without any prompting.
Using LiveProject provides instant communication for your project; eliminate the need for Microsoft Project installations for your team, and keeps everyone informed, organized and on schedule.