Omni Group released their latest big upgrade on Wednesday, OmniPlan version 4. OmniPlan is a macOS and iOS app for project management, allowing you to view and collaborate on forecasting costs, scheduling, and more. As always with an app from Omni Group, there’s way more. In fact, I was able to attend a demo to see these new features in action.
One thing that stood out to me was the new assistant, so when you set up a new project you get some help making sure you’re choosing the right options for what you need to do. It can be very frustrating to get well into a project you’ve set up only to discover you basically need to set it up over again with different options (please don’t ask me how I know).
Another really great feature is improved tracking on cost and effort. If you need to track financial information, you can add it as part of your project and see either what this one step costs, or what the entire project cost is (for that resource or all of them) up to a specific point. There are some display improvements for how to view things, and a new file type for version 4 which improves compatibility if you sync files (say, using Dropbox or Box).
But especially if you use the iOS version of OmniPlan, the biggest addition comes with the Pro version which includes support for Omni Automation. This is a way to script tasks using Core JavaScript language and works on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. There’s a page on the Omni Automation site for each app which has examples and documentation to help you build the your own task killing robots.
I got to see a demo of the automation in action, and you can check out an example in the video below:
(courtesy of Omni-Automation and the OmniGroup)
OmniPlan is released in conjunction with the new Omni Group Store, which includes new options for subscriptions and licensing. Anything purchased under an Omni Account, whether a subscription or a one-time license, will show as purchased. A single account with a subscription can be used anywhere the app is available. This means it can be a lot easier for an organization to manage team licenses, and not worry about which Apple ID it’s tied to or other issues that can arise with App Store purchases.
This doesn’t change App Store purchases, if you prefer your payments to go through the Mac or iOS App Stores instead, that’s still an option for both the subscription and the one-time purchase. For OmniPlan 4, that purchase is a one-time “traditional” purchase for $199.99 for Standard, and $399.99 for Pro. Subscription prices are $19.99 per month, or $199.99 per year.