Don't Be Tied to a Terminal
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In this video I'm going to show you an interesting little program that synchronizes your Microsoft Project files with your timesheet.
You can have your project managers, supervisors, team leads updating your MSP file. And then engineers, technicians, employees working on their timesheets and this little program will sync it up.
No need to touch anything, does it automatically. Let's take a look.
I've switched over to my screen and let's take a look at this amazing little program that can synchronize between Microsoft Project and Standard Time®.
The name of the program is MSP.exe; it's a little console application completely independent of MSP, completely independent of Standard Time. It's a little piece of glue that pulls down all of the tasks from MSP.
It puts them into the Standard Time database, brings all of the employee hours up from the timesheet and puts them into the actual work column and into the task usage view in MSP.
It turns out you can't actually run this program on its own because you need some parameters to run. So you're gonna to have to bring in your IT person to take a look at this and set this up so that you can use it.
What I've done is create a little batch file that has those parameters that allow me to run this and perform the synchronization. I know this is getting advanced and a little techy but the advantages are really great. Because you'll be able to run this multiple times a day, you can run it at night, you come in in the morning all of your tasks are updated in Standard Time.
All of your actual work has been pushed up to MSP. So the advantages are wonderful but it's a little techy and your IT person may have to create batch files or set up a scheduler to do this.
I'll run this little batch file we'll look into to how it works. So this little program is running, it's opening up MSP performing the synchronization and then shutting it down. There it is, it's all done. I can switch over to Standard Time and see what happens.
What is happened is that there is a new project out here that now has all of the tasks that came down from MSP. If I switch over to the timesheet I see the tasks that are assigned to me. This is nothing new, you've already seen this if you've looked at the other videos on synchronizing between Standard Time and MSP.
You can go type some hours into these tasks and we can shut down Standard Time because this little program will now synchronize them. I'll go ahead and run it again presumably this would happen at night or during the day sometime.
The synchronization has occurred and now I've opened up MSP to take a look at what has happened over there. I go to the view menu click on the task usage view and you can see some of the hours that have come down here. This is nothing new you may want to look at the videos on the MSP add-in that does the same thing or in Standard Time there is a menu item that does the same thing.
This little application, I'll switch back to the program, this application is completely independent. That's the real value of this. Let's take a look at what's inside this little batch file. If I right click on it, choose edit, you'll first of all see it's calling the msp.exe program. You need a project in Standard Time that this is going to connect to. You need to be able to connect to the Standard Time database, so that's what these are for. Then you need an mpp file that this little program can open up.
Give it those parameters and this thing will fire right up and run. Actually it won't fire right up, you need a batch file and double click on it. Or you can go over to the control panel, go into system and security under administrative tools there is a thing called schedule tasks. You can use this to schedule this little program to run on a nightly basis. And when you do this thing will run automatically on a completely different machine or server.
Where ever you want to have it run, you'll need MSP on your machine. This little thing will sit there and run all the time. And will do that synchronization for you.
Very neat little program that you should take a look at in addition to the MSP add-in or plug-in that we have. And the menu item in Standard Time. Lots of different ways to get your actual hours up to MSP and your tasks down to Standard Time. Have a look at this if you want an automated way to synchronize MSP with your timesheet.
More Microsoft Project links: Integrate Standard Time with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Project Info
This article Automatic Microsoft Project Sync With Timesheet was first seen on http://www.stdtime.com
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