Ways of publishing details of allocations to your resources

You can publish details of allocations to your permanent resources in the following ways:

As tasks in the resources' Microsoft Outlook® task lists.
As appointments in the resources' Outlook calendars.
As emails sent to Outlook.
As emails via any SMTP mail server.

Depending on the software that is running on your computers and servers, you may be able to configure Asta Powerproject to use more than one method of publication at the same time. For example, you could publish allocations as tasks and send an email to your resources at the same time to inform them of the allocation.

You can also choose whether to publish details automatically, as and when resource allocations are created or edited in Asta Powerproject, or manually, at a time of your choosing.

You cannot publish details of permanent resource allocations to Microsoft Outlook and via SMTP email in Asta Powerproject SaaS.

Publishing allocations as tasks in Outlook task lists

You can choose to publish details of permanent resource allocations so that they appear as new tasks in each permanent resource’s Outlook task list. The start and finish date and time of the task match those of the resource allocation in Asta Powerproject, as do the progress and work attributes. Other details of the allocation are given in the body of the task.

If you use Outlook alongside Microsoft Exchange in your organisation, you can choose to publish allocations as tasks either directly to your permanent resources’ folders on the Exchange server or to a shared or public folder that contains everyone’s task lists.

Publishing allocations as appointments in Outlook calendars

You can choose to publish details of permanent resource allocations so that they appear as new appointments in each permanent resource’s Outlook calendar. The start and finish date and time of the calendar appointment match those of the resource allocation in Asta Powerproject and details of the allocation are given in the body of the calendar appointment. All calendar appointments that are created in this way are given a category of ‘Elecosoft’.

You can specify whether allocations that have a duration of 1d (or 3d, or 4d, etc) rather than a duration that gives a specific number of hours such as 5h, 7h or 7.5h should result in 'all day event' Outlook appointments, or whether they should result in Outlook appointments with start and finish times that are taken from the appropriate calendar.

Note that milestone allocations - which do not have a duration in Asta Powerproject - appear in Outlook calendars as appointments with a duration of 15 minutes. Normally, dates that have appointments appear in bold when you view a monthly calendar in Outlook. However, if the only appointments for a date are those relating to milestones, the date is not emboldened in the monthly calendar view.

In the same way as publishing allocations as tasks, you can choose to publish allocations as calendar appointments either directly to your permanent resources’ folders on the Exchange server or to a shared or public folder that contains everyone’s calendars.

Publishing allocations as emails

You can choose to publish details of permanent resource allocations as emails, either sent to Outlook or via a specified SMTP mail server. If you choose to publish manually, all allocations are combined together into a single email for each permanent resource; if you choose to publish automatically, a new email is sent out each time an allocation is created or edited.

Specifying the details to publish

You can choose to publish details of permanent resource allocations in a detailed format, or in a compact format.

The detailed format contains the following information about each task to which an allocation relates:

Task ID.
Task name.
Path name.
Start date.
Finish date.
Percentage complete.
Total effort.
Actual effort.

The compact format contains the following information about each task to which an allocation relates:

Task name and path.
Start date.
Finish date.
Percentage complete.
Total and actual effort.

Regardless of the format you choose, you can append additional information to the tasks, appointments or emails that inform permanent resources of their allocations, such as the tasks' unique task ID, WBS code, which code libraries are assigned to the tasks and the contents of user-defined fields.