A recent presentation, Keep Your Outlook Calendar Up to Date with Your Microsoft Project Tasks Using the P2O Application, was presented by Ben Howard.

Ben began with discussing the fact that the majority of users tend to use Outlook to plan ad-hoc and semi structured work, simply because Outlook is such a great tool for managing personal calendars and creating meeting requests with other users. This is probably also likely because Outlook’s reach is so immense. Most all of us can access on the desktop or the cell phone in our pockets.

Ben pointed out that formal project work is, of course, planned and tracked in MS Project—in what is effectively a separate data silo. Synchronizing these formal Project tasks with Outlook’s calendar has never been high on Microsoft’s priority list, and yet, the value of these tools being integrated is great for project managers and resources alike.

In the demonstration you saw if you attended last month’s webinar, we heard about one application that allows project managers to synchronize tasks from MS Project into Outlook. Ben pointed out that tasks can be synced either as calendar items or as meeting requests, thereby allowing Project Managers to have a single view of all of their work in their Outlook calendar! The application, P2O, is available as a Project Add-in. Ben’s company, Applepark feels it is the application that Microsoft should have written. Further information is available at www.applepark.co.uk/p2o.