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Open Workbench Warrior 
ITDesing OWB download page for the standalone versions is
http://www.itdesign.de/en/support-downloads/downloads.html
Hi Martti! Thanks for posting.
Hi Martti. The link above is not working.
As of Feb 10 2016 the ITDesign site is in German only (as far as I can see)
The page to get OWB is
https://itdesign.de/ppm/open-workbench/
That is in German, too, and you have to fill your details.
You can guess what the fields and you have check the Datanschutz box (Privacy)
I’m new to Open Workbench. Are there any manuals or documentation for OWB 2.0?
Hi John, and welcome! The manuals for OWB 1.1.x, if you have them, also largely apply to OWB 2.0. I’m going through my OWB documentation, customizing it for version 2.0 and publishing it here, but of course it takes time as a part-time project. The changes in 2.0 are largely look & feel, together with some bug fixes. All of the articles on this site use OWB 2.0 for demonstration purposes. The Help file that comes with OWB 2.0 has been updated to reflect changes. I don’t know of any manuals (other than those on this site) which are OWB 2.0 specific.
To get information from other sources, you can google ‘Open Workbench Tutorial’ which brings up several links to the Open Workbench Idiot’s Guide (I didn’t come up with that name) and some really good YouTube vids.
Thanks for the info. I did find what appears to be a fairlly good 1.1 manual, and I’ll check your other suggestions.
Do you have a link for that manual, John?
This is the link to OWB 1.1 manual: http://www.erfolgreiche-firmengruendung.de/down/projektmanagement_freeware/Open_Workbench_tutorial.pdf
There are User guides for 1.16 around
ftp://ftp.psu.ac.th/pub/openworkbench/OpenWorkbench_Guide_ENU.pdf
There is also user guide for 2.0 if you have access to it
https://supportcontent.ca.com/cadocs/0/CA%20Clarity%20PPM%2013%200%2000-ENU/Bookshelf_Files/HTML/owb/index.htm?toc.htm?1902257.html
ITDesign is giving a Webinar on the new things in OWB (allegedly in German) on May 8
http://www.itdesign.de/en/news-events/webcasts/webinare-detailansicht/veranstaltung/News/detail/webinar-owb-20-in-ca-clarity-ppm-version-13.html?no_cache=1&cHash=52d2ca53332a491394f8467e66b52846
There are 1.16 User guides around
ftp://ftp.psu.ac.th/pub/openworkbench/OpenWorkbench_Guide_ENU.pdf
There is also 2.0 User guide if you can access that
https://supportcontent.ca.com/cadocs/0/CA%20Clarity%20PPM%2013%200%2000-ENU/Bookshelf_Files/HTML/owb/index.htm?toc.htm?1902257.html
ITdesign is giving a webinar on the new features of OWB 2.0 on May 8 (in German)
http://www.itdesign.de/en/news-events/webcasts/webinare-detailansicht/veranstaltung/News/detail/webinar-owb-20-in-ca-clarity-ppm-version-13.html?no_cache=1&cHash=52d2ca53332a491394f8467e66b52846
Thanks, Martti.
IT Design have a webinar focussing on Open Workbench 2.0 on 8th May 2012. In German, which prevents me from participating, but for those interested I’d recommend signing up:
http://www.itdesign.de/en/news-events/webcasts/webinare-detailansicht/veranstaltung/News/detail/webinar-owb-20-in-ca-clarity-ppm-version-13.html?no_cache=1&cHash=52d2ca53332a491394f8467e66b52846
Hi All,
Is there a forum where we can discuss the usage of Open Workbench (V2.0)?
Hi Joe. You can use this Open Forum, or leave a comment on any of the other article here. Alternatively, there is a LinkedIn group for Open Workbench and there’s also a Facebook page. If you have any suggestions, or requests for posts you think I should put up please feel free to let me know. Otherwise, there are a few people who frequent here who have extensive experience with Open Workbench and will be more than happy to answer questions or engage in discussion. Cheers!
Hi and thank you for your kind answer.
Does anybody knows how to display/print task notes?
If I add the notes field to a view, only the first line is shown.
You only see the first line of notes. Though that can be 256 character wide.
Thanks for the (forseen) answer.
May be I will look to use the XML Export and some Excel.
That should work fine if you can handle xml tags
Martti K.
Can’t display xml which starts with
*WORKBENCH_PROJECT>
*BaseCalendars>
*Calendar
name=”Standard”>
*/Calendar>
*/BaseCalendars>
*Projects>
*Project
UID=”AJD-`W`?!_“`.:V#@#<!“`?P“`0″ program=”false” closed=”false” finish=”2012-05-24T17:00:00″
active=”true” name=”Notes” startImposed=”false” finishImposed=”false” trackMode=”0″
cpmType=”0″ priority=”10″ start=”2012-05-24T08:00:00″ projectID=”Notes” format=”0″
approved=”false” openForTimeEntry=”true”>
*Tasks>
*Task
start=”2012-05-24T08:00:00″ proxy=”false” critical=”false” status=”0″ outlineLevel=”1″
finish=”2012-05-24T17:00:00″ summary=”false” milestone=”false” name=”T1″ taskID=”T1″
fixed=”false” locked=”false” key=”false” percComp=”0.0″ unplanned=”false”>
*Notes>
*Note
createdBy=”Unknown” createdDate=”2012-05-24T23:25:02″ content=”Note 1″/>
*Note
createdBy=”Unknown” createdDate=”2012-05-24T23:25:06″ content=”Note 2″/>
*Note
createdBy=”Unknown” createdDate=”2012-05-24T23:25:11″ content=”note 3″/>
*Note
createdBy=”Unknown” createdDate=”2012-05-24T23:25:16″ content=”Note 4″/>
*/Notes>
*/Task>
*/Tasks>
*/Project>
*/Projects>
*/WORKBENCH_PROJECT>
You shouldn’t need to tie yourself up in knots with XML, Joe.
First, format a View with the columns you want to see. In the image below, I’ve used the standard Gantt Chart, and added the Note Text field into it. I recommend adding the Note Text field as the very last column in the View.
Note, only the first line of the latest note appears. The note that appears in the picture above actually comprises two lines, as shown in the image of the Notes Dialog Box below:
By the way, you can edit a single note if you want to use the technique below to show (for example) a comments history. As you can see from the image below, I’ve added an update to my original note:
The comment you see in your View will also change to reflect the update:
Once you’re happy with the fields displaying in your View, select the rows you want to copy (using the Row Selector at the left of the window), and copy (Ctrl-C, or right-click –> Copy). You can then paste into Excel, and the entire Note Text (not just the first row) will paste. As you can see from the image below, it pastes a little ‘hokey’ over multiple lines (rows 4, 5 and 6 in the Excel).
You’ll notice I’ve pasted it into Row 2, so I can enter Field Names into Row 1 (if you’re going to use the Excel for a report). Expanding the columns so the information is visible, you get this:
You can now go through and fix up the notes. If you are experienced with Macros in Excel, you can use VBA to automate the process. This File contains a simple macro I wrote that will do the job, although you’ll need to play with it a bit to make it bullet-proof. Step through the code to see how it works. After running my macro across the Excel file above, I get this:
Anyway, I hope this helps and maybe removes some frustration. The lack of a reporting capability is definitely one of the key failings of Open Workbench!
Hi Gantt Guy,
thanks so much for this detailed solution, to report more than one line of a task note!
I believe, that other Open Workbench users will like this too.
>> You can then paste into Excel, and the entire Note Text (not just the first row) will paste.
This is the key info for me and although your excel macro I will use later.
Thanks, Joe
You did say display/print task notes like multiple notes not multiple lines of a note
Good point, Martti. I may well have misread the original question. If I did, I apologise.
….
>> If I add the notes field to a view, only the first line is shown.
That was the question, thanks for all your help.
Well, Joe seems to be happy with your response. Kudos for you.
Hi,
is it possible to put some infos to the gantt-chart bars like ressources, start/end, duration etc.
I could not find anything.
Thanks for your help!
Not that I am aware of.
Have look at the workarounds
http://www.nbl.fi/that_man/Workarounds/Workarounds.htm
Interesting website and nice tipps.
But it looks not so good as ganttproject, isn’t it?
Are you referring to the product or the website?
There is a new version 2.01 available: http://www.itdesign.de/support-download/downloads.html#c602 (itdesign Open Workbench 2.0.1)
Does anybody knows about the changes to V2.0 Beta?
Don’t see any remarkable changes in the GUI. Autoshcedule is still called Autoplan and no edit view button. In the about it is still 2.0.0
I would like to view a certain task including linked tasks (predecessor, successor).
Does anybody knows how to set a filter or something like that?
Have you looked at the Dependency Definition view. Just type the name of the task in the quick search box and the list is filtered for that task and the dependent tasks are also displayed.
Great idea!
I can define a view with same details for the linked tasks as for the searched task.
Firstly I thought, that they should be displayed in the same column and could not find a solution.
Is it possible to reduce the availability of a ressource e.g. to 40% (2 days a week)?
I can not change this value in the ressource details, it is “grey”.
Many thanks!
It is easy (or at least in previous cases) in a view. You can have the resource availability in days, hours or percent in one column or all of them on separate columns or lines. To get more details you could have availability timescaled, but then you need to do it for the whole project. That is in the How to section in http://www.nbl.fi/~nbl3674/Howtos/Howtos.htm
Thanks for your reply, may be my english is too bad.
I would like to reduce the availability not to view it!
Your answer is regarding viewing, isn’t it?
You can change this value at the beginning of your project, when no work effort is assigned. If you use Clarity, you can change it anytime, in the resource page, in the allocation %
No, that applies for editing/setting/writing. When you have the availability whether it is in a single column or timescaled view there is a default value in in, but you can write your value.
But how can I change the availabilty of a ressource? It can not be changed in a view.
E.g. instead of 8hrs a day I woul like to have 4hrs a day availability.
This will change the duration of an associated task with 40hrs effort to 10 wdays instead of 5 wdays.
Sorry if there is any misunderstanding.
You just type the new availability
Eg. 50 in
and the availability will change also in the timescaled section and hr/day.
You can also change the 8 to 4 instead of changing the percentage or type new values in the timescaled area
Hi Martti,
thanks for this perfect explanation!
Great!
I’ve created a new calendar with 10-hour workdays 5 days a week, but even though I’ve applied the new calendar every task that I apply a resource with 10 hours to updates with a 2-day duration (8 hrs the first day and 2 hrs the next). What am I doing wrong?
And now…after saving a baseline, I have tried to change the calendar to a 4-day week with 9-hour days. When I run the autoplan again the only thing that happens is that a few fixed-duration tasks at the end of the schedule lose their durations and move a bit, but otherwise nothing changes–removing more than 15 hours in the week should change quite a bit. Can anyone help on this one?
If you are using stand alone OWB the way it worked in 1.1.6 and I should assume also in 2.0 is that the project calendar is not saved (not by itself nor with the project) So if you want to do anything using nonstandard calendar, first recreate the nonstandard calendar and the act ie. load or create your project, autoschedule and so on.
Martti K.
I never like to leave things alone, so I am a sucker for custom fields. In MSP I usually create custom fields for cost management etc, but I can’t see how to do this in OWB. Is it possible?
Hi Les. It’s only possible to create custom fields in OWB if you’re a CA Clarity user. You can create custom fields in Clarity Studio and then them to flow through to OWB. Not very useful if you’re not a CA Clarity user, though. Also, OWB doesn’t do colour-coding of icons the way MSP does.
You can use this task user attributes : usertext1, usertext2, usernumber1 and usernumber2. Create a view with theses to edit them.
Hi!
I cant download Open workbench 2.0 or 2.0.1 because itdesign.be is down.
Is there any alternative download?
Thanks
I’m not sure what’s happened to the itdesign site, Martin, but I’ve found another link which may work:
http://en.kioskea.net/download/download-1357-open-workbench
I’ve emailed my contact at itdesign and asked what’s happening with their site.
On Sept 7 2 PM GMT ITDesign site seems to be OK.
Martti K.
Hi Martti. I still can’t get to itdesign.de. It times out. Weird!
That download at kioskea seems to be version 1.16
Martti K.
I found a direct download link to itdesign.de (without accessing their site beucase they have problem with their database it seems) with the versions:
http://www.itdesign.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Downloads/Open_Workbench_Setup_2.0.1.exe
http://www.itdesign.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Downloads/Open_Workbench_Setup_2.0.0.exe
Someone download them and upload at some site?
Martin
Now I am getting
and can’t download.
If it does not work on Sunday I’ll see if I can put it somewhere.
ITDesign.de is working again, but still English and German mixed
Installer: Open Workbench Installer 2.0.1 (25 MB)
itdesign Open Workbench 2.0.1 (Benötigt die Java Runtime Environment 32-bit 1.6 oder 1.7)
If you have problems try
http://www.nbl.fi/that_man/OWB/Open_Workbench_Setup_2.0.1.exe
and
http://www.nbl.fi/that_man/OWB/116Open_Workbench_Setup.exe
That’s great! Thanks for hosting the exe’s, Martti. itdesign.de is also working for me again now too.
I’m new to Open Workbench… Is there a way to set the duration of a task to something less than one day? I have a set of three tasks to be completed by a single resource in a single day. How do I set this up?
OWB calculates in increments of less than one day (in tenths of seconds!), so if you have a resource who will work on Task A for 4 hours and Task B for 4 hours, the AutoSchedule function will schedule both of those to occur on the same day (all other things being equal).
The time-scaled view (the right-hand section of the screen) is, sadly, a third-party control and the minimum it can display is one day. There have been many, many, many complaints about this going back a number of years, but no hope for change as yet.
I have the same issue. I am using version 1.1.4. If I enter.5 into the duration (for 4 hours), it is changed back to 1. How do I get 1/2 day or 4 hours into the duration? I am okay with the display being wrong if the scheduling is correct.
You cannot enter duration less than one day, but can assign work effort in hours (or days) that are less than 1 day (2 hours, or 0.1 day).
But if you have several linked tasks (with cascading dependancies), each having less than 1 day work effort, each task will start on the next day of the predecessor (you won’t have each 3 tasks scheduled on the same day).
Note : I have not tested this under OW 2.0, behavior mahe have changed.
I am just starting to use Open Workbench, I have version 1.1.4. When I use autoschedule to create a schedule, it appears to over allocates resouces. I can have five tasks without dependencies for a resource that last one day, it will schedule them all on the same day and completely ignore that the resource cannot do 50 hours of work in 8 hours. What am I missing?
To further clarify, I do have the resource contraints check box marked. I also downloaded version 2.01 and scheduled there with the same results. There has to be some setting that I am missing, but I cannot seem to find it. Thanks.
Remember that OW must be used to compute dates and duration. You have to enter tasks, assign resources and work effort, and let the autoplan do the rest.
Are your working in hours or days ? What effort have you entered for each resource ? Have you network constraints (fixed duration, locked task) ?
Create a resource with 8h/day capacity, assign this resource to each task with 16h effort, and autoplan, do you still have the pb ?
OWB is suited for resource management type of project management. That means it schedules resource effort. Autoschedule calculates task durations based on the resource effort assigned to them. Calculating forward pass from a single starting point to a single end point and then backward pass gives the critical path. Next calculation is to remove overallocation of resources from initially simultaneous tasks and gives the resource critical path. That is all mathematical formulas. If you don’t have the prequisites, single start and end, dependencies between tasks to determine sequency, effort defined on the resource assignments to tasks OWB simply can’t do all of those calculations and the result is not a perfect schedule.
Generally a task in a project is some 40 hours of effort, maybe some more or some less. You can argue that the duration of a task can be less than a day. OWB is designed so that the minimum duration of a task can be one day. That is different from the resource effort assigned to the task which can be as the Gantt guy says seconds. The displays will have them such tasks occur on the same day if you have not selected the option start the successor the next day.
You may want to schedule items where the durations are less than a day and call that a project.
Nothing against that. The thing is that OWB is not the best tool for scheduling appointment like taks..
That makes sense and I can make that work for me. At this point, I am just trying to learn the tool while I am working with the sponsor to get the project charter completed so my data is not “real”. WIth real data in the system with dependencies and durations that are more realistic, this will work. Thanks for the reply.
There were a lot of examples and good content on the old OWB site which are gone now. One of the items was a good basic guide called Idiots_Guide_to_OpenWorkBench. It is still around. One of the places you can get is from Prince Sonkla University site
http://ftp.psu.ac.th/pub/openworkbench/
Thanks. I just down loaded it and will review it. I appreciate the help.
There are also a bunch of tutorials, etc. in the Document Library section of this site.
It includes a version of the “Idiot’s Guide” (although I changed it to “Beginner’s Guide”)!
Sorry about that , had not looked into the Document library for a while.
With the recent Clarity version CA has apparently made also OWB documentation available without support site access. Try if these work for you
Click to access OpenWorkbench_UserGuide_ENU.pdf
Click to access OpenWorkbench_ReleaseNotes_ENU.pdf
Thanks again.
Some years ago I started a document which had examples of autoscheduling from the OWB site posts. I got stuck at the theory part of autoschedule which was at the time available at several places. Currently I am not aware of any place where to look for that.
My draft is at
Click to access Autoshceduling_basic_rules.pdf
That should have been
Click to access Autoshceduling_basic_rules.pdf
I just started using Open workbook for small construction projects, is this my best option or are there any better free or affordable software would rather get the free ones for now. I am not so much concerned on the effort but the task in days and not hours. HELP
AFAIK the only other free offering is something called GanttProject, but I’ve not used it at all.
There is also OpenProj.
Reborn as ProjectLibre.
Hello from Holland, I have a problem opening some open workbench files. When I try to open the files, I get an error message: Unable to open project. …file …..Circular Reference Error
How can I solve this ? I don’t want to retype all the information in these files.
Thanks for your help.
Lisa
Sorry to say I am not aware how that can be solved or how it occurs. There is no good way to open the rmp file for editing and to manually locate and fix the problem. It has been suggested that deleting the site.rmg file could help, but in a case where this error came it did not.
It is possible that the error could be cause if a task with dependencies is deleted.
I saw several other people on the internet with this problem, but no solutions were available. So I have to retype the project 😦 and regularly make backups from the correct functioning versions.
I have same problem for no reason. I went home on Friday and on Monday I got the error. I was using 1.1 at the time, upgraded to 2 and no change.
How did you see the other people reporting than? When I Google I don’t get anything related to OWB.
@Marti, for instance: http://reactiveme.wordpress.com/2006/09/page/3/
There was another (better) one in a forum, but I can’t find it anymore.
How did you find that, as I wrote I do not get anything OWB related with circular reference.
Google: “Circular Reference” “Open workbench”
Thanks.
This is a learning experience with search.
Circular reference Open Workbench OWB does not return anything meaningful.
“Circular reference” “Open Workbench” OWB returns something
“Circular reference” “Open Workbench” returns all kinds of things
On first page it shows three pages of results on second page it only shows two pages of results
Circular reference seems to be a general message and appear also in various versions of MS Project.
Some people have even posted the proprietary Niku code where the error is thrown.
When you try to create something in OWB which creates a circular reference OWB give you the error and you cannot save.
That would lead you to believe that if you can save you are OK. But as you and others have seen that is not the case.
Some things that were in the results I can think could cause circular reference
Dependencies
Normal task dependencies give the error when creating and do not allow you to create.
It might be possible to create External dependencies and Master – Subproject relations that have a circular reference if you do not have all the files opened at the same time. However, you should be able to rectify that opening just one file at a time.
Base calendar pointing to itself
That again is something which OWB does not allow to be saved in a single project.
Circular reference in role hierarchy
That again is something which OWB does not allow to be saved in a single project.
Task constraints
The constraints for tasks could be circular.
Global resources
Stand alone OWB accumulates all the resources in all projects opened in to Global resources and saves them with any project every time a project is saved. The only way to keep Global resources limited to those in the current project is to re-launch OWB for every project and to open one project only. You can clean the Global resources for a project editing in the XML format file.
OWB can have one resource name multiple times. OWB differentiates it with the ID displayed to the user ID and with the internal ID.
If you already have a resource in the Global resources and then try to open a project with the same resource name with another internal ID in the Global resources that could give circular reference. If that is the case re-launch of OWB would clear the situation.
There could be more reasons for circular reference and going through all of the code would allow to identify them more easily.
When you encounter circular reference error while opening a project plan to OWB from a file most likely there was no problem in saving. That should indicate that the projet plan was OK, but something in OWB is different. The way that can happen is that Global file (site.rmg) is created or changed after the save. Global file store some values for OWB which are different from the defaults (or the ones coming from repository if one is used). What all the values are is not documented, but calendars is one thing.
If the Global file is the problem then deleting site.rmg and relaunch of OWB would solve the problem.
It would be an enhancement to be able to open the project file even if there is the circular reference so that you could remove it.
However, when OWB is used with Clarity people rarely bring up this error and they are the one who could influence OWB development.
In fact the searches for circular reference did not return anything from Clarity support site Knowledge base.
Sorry to can’t help.
Never seen this error in ten year, with a 600 users Clarity environment.
OWB is opening very slow. I never had this problem before, but now I made use of the functionality with master and subprojects. I have one masterproject and 10 subprojects. Everytime I add somethings to the project and save it, it will cost exceedingly more time to open the project. The day before yesterday it opened in about 2 hours. Yesterday it opened in 5 hours. This morning at 9:00am I opened the masterproject, and now at 20:51 in the evening, it still is loading. I think it will open at about 23:00, so it takes 14 hours.
Is this normal ? Is there something I can do about this ? Are there soms system limits in the number of projects or resources (about 12) ? Or something I could better not do ?
I don’t think there is much you can do. You can only try to keep your project plan simple and minimize the number or tasks. You could also try to manage the subprojects each in separate sessions. I would guess the most users would have given up with load times like that. Does your HW have enough disk space, memory and CPU?
Hello
I use OWB since few weeks and I have stil a question about configuration.
In the OWB Options, on the Location tab, there’s a value for Global files (Ficheir global in the french version). Can someone explain what will be stored in this location ?
I use OWB in a standalone mode, without Clarity.
Thanks in advance
Fred
I have not seen that documented anywhere. That stores data which overrides the defaults in stand alone OWB and the repository values when OWB is used with Clarity. The name of the file is site.rmg Among the data it stores is resource and project calendar shift length and working days. and resource rates. What else I don’t know.
Hello
I’ve got another question about using OWB in standalone mode.
I plan a project and save it in a file project1. Then I close OWB and relaunch it. I create a new project. And in this second project’s properties, after saving it, in the Ressource’s tab, I see the ressource of the first project. I expected to find no ressource.
Have you got an explanation ?
Thanks in advance
Fred
Every time you create a resource in OWB that is stored in the Global resources (see project properties – resources) When you save the project the Global resources are saved with it. When you open a new project in the same session the project gets the those Global resources and if you save the project the the Global resources are saved with that project, too. Eventually you have the Global resources in all of your projects.
If you don’t want to have Global resources you should open only one project per session and relaunch OBW before you open the next project.
If you want to get rid of the Global resources you should save every project file in xml forma and edit the files and remove the contents of pool resources, but leave the tags and save to a copy. Then verify in a new OBS session that you can open the copy of project plan. Do the same for all projects.
Hello,
I’m a confirmed user of OWB. I discovered this site and I am happy to see that OWB is not dead!
I use 1.1.6 and I would like to assess 2.1 but I cannot find any release notice to know what’s happened between both version. Where can I find this kind of information?
Thanks & regards
Hi Pierre. I’m not sure of any Release Notes for version 2, and a quick search has revealed only the version 2 User Guide on the CA Support site:
Click to access OpenWorkbench_UserGuide_ENU.pdf
Just established that there are differences between 2.0 and 2.1
One of them is snap to fit which works on column width, pane content vs width and pane height vs content.
Hi all
OWB was OpenSource and then it was hold by CA.
I think (I have no clue) that the version 2 is just the version hold by CA (the same as 1.1.6 but with CA’s logo…).
The version 2.1 is for Java7.
Fred
OWB was Open SOurce at one point in the sense that the source code was available.
In 1.1.6 it was no longer available, but the OWB install package was free.
2.0 and later are developed by ITDesign(.de) and you can down load them from their site. CA logo came in something like 1.1.7. OWB 2.0 introduced the ribbon menu to give the look and feel of the Office 2007 ribbon. Even if all the menu items would fit at the same time. There are a few enhancements and a few problems. The documentation can bee accessed from the CA site (please refer to the above post)
Thanks Martti for these precisions.
And sorry for my mistakes.
Glad to be of service.
Hi everybody
For my project plan, I have some external informations to handle : it’s a regular work that happens every month.
One way to show this is making a “phase” (french word for WBS Level 1) with one task per month (WBS level 2). But this puts one line per month in the figure.
I’d like to make one task (WBS level 2) for showing this, but with non continuous periods. It will show something like this :
TaskName xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx___________xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx________xxxxxxxxxxx______
Has anybody an idea ?
Thanks in advance
Hi Fred,
Have you tried the fixed loading pattern ?
As-tu essayé d’utiliser le modèle de chargement ‘Imposé’ ? il te permet de saisir au jour le jour le RAF. Attention : dans ce cas il est obligatoire de verrouiller la tâche. La planification ne modifiera pas cette planif.
That was referred as a repeating task.
You assign a resource to the task
Give ETC on a timescaled view for those timeperiod you want the task to occur.
Click the Gantt chart area and choose discontinuous from the options.
Change the loading pattern to fixed.if you do not want Autoschedule to change the dates and the bar.
The English names for the WBS levels are Phase, Activity and Task. Task is the level where you assign resources. In French that is Etape or Tache. There are some multilingual names in
http://www.nbl.fi/that_man/Dataelements/Datalements.htm taken from the source code, but the names of the WBS levels are not there.
Thanks for your answer.
For informatin, here’s a french website for first steps with OWB.
For discontinuous task : http://open.btp.free.fr/?/Planification/WorkBench5
Thanks for the time. The French OWB forums I know have not been that lively.
http://openworkbench.ici.st/
http://www.gestiondeprojet.com/forums/read.php?13,2365,2386#msg-2386&_Re-fonctionnement-OWB-sur-1-ordinateur-en-reseau_Gestion-de-projet-Logiciel-OpenWorkbench
Hi all !
This morning, I want to open my project (rmp format)… But I gt the message : “Unable to open the project D:\…\…rmp. An error has occured”.
I tried to put it as a sub-project in another one. Same result.
What can I do ?
If restarting everything does not help you take the latest backup that opens. If you don’t have one you re-start from scratch.
That’s what I thought. But I hoped there were some log files to help me to understand, or some utility program…
I think I would put the files in XML format.
Thanks…and now go to work.
Out of the box I don’t recall there is anything else than the Windows Event logs which not help much. To avoid problems like this the user needs to backup the project in files with different names while working.
There is TEC468125 Title: Clarity: How do I enable Scheduler logging for Open Workbench troubleshooting?
in CA support site knowledge base, but you would need support account to access that.
On the other hand if you have the trace on when the problem occurs that might tell you what happens, but not necessarily help you to recover the project plan in the file.
The Windows Event Log doesn’t show anything. As I expected.
For the TEC in CA knowledge base, I use OWB as a standalone application.
I have a backup for 2 days, so it’s not so worth…
Hi, not sure how active this forum is, I just found it. We’re using OWB 1.2.2 with CA Clarity. I’ve got a relatively large project plan and a group of team members who are not doing time tracking in Clarity. I’d still like to track their actuals in OWB however. The problem I’m having is if I enter the actual hours worked on a task for a specific resource, OWB will decrement the ETC that by amount and show the actuals. I can save the project back and everything is fine. But once I close the project and re-open it, the actuals are gone, the ETC is updated but no actuals. I’d like to keep track of the actuals for these team members. Does anyone have any ideas?
The posts usually get responded fairly quickly. However, if you are using CA Clarity you can also get support for OWB from CA.
Also anybody can view the Clarity Global community message boards on MyCA including the Clarity general and OWB boards. To post you need to register, but you do not need to be a Clarity customer to register.
This site is created to to cover OWB in areas which are not covered elsewhere and to encourage discussion on OWB and to share experience
For your particular question see
https://communities.ca.com/web/ca-clarity-global-user-community/message-board/-/message_boards/view_message/10100053?&#p_19
That covers a little your problems in different OWB and Clarity versions.
There is something in Worldpress, because I have subscribhed to new posts and did get notification email from your post only a week later.
Thanks Martti. I was finally able to track down someone in our organization with access to CA Support and they gave us a fix to take care of this. One of my colleagues was able to find that same thread on the CA Communities forum and that was a big help as well.
I am new to OWB and getting hard time with the calculation algorithm of Float field in OWB
Please tell more.
Normally OWB calculates for each task assignment the duration from the ETC at the resource daily availabilty. That will just days. Then it will calculate the critical path based on durations dependencies and other rules. The durations will be converted to working days while doing that. Then OWB makes the backward calculation starting from the end date. The differences between the early and late dates (start and finish will have the same) will be the float.
Thanks martti, this explanation helps.
Are you the Namita with whom I am connected in LinkedIn?
May be someone can help me with this:
Task with one ressource 50% assigned and 2 days effort.
Duration is automatically set to 1 day.
After calculationthe duration does not change to 4 days, it still shows 1 day.
What I am doing wrong? The whole day I was looking for some options or something else, but could change this behaviour.
Any suggestions? I’m using V2.1
Tried that with an earlier version and with that there definitely was no problem.
Will try wilh v2.1 too.
Got to v2.0.0 and not much different
OWB 2.1.0 beta behaves the same way
The program though has this new snap to fit feature.which works nicely.
Thanks for your time and help.
I still have the problem, duration will not change based on effort.
See screenshot:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4WT1rq_dD3EZ3ExNlNpTWRIV1E/edit?usp=sharing
Any idea what I’m doing wrong?
Before installing V2.1 everything was fine, going back to 2.0.1 makes no difference, still the same problem.
Give your resource an ID so that it will be shown when it is assigned to the task and take another screenshot.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4WT1rq_dD3ERHRMeWVITVNzZE0/edit?usp=sharing
My project looks about the same as yours, but when I hit autoplan the duration changes.
It is frustrating, autoplan and new calculation are not changing the duration.
Before upgrading to 2.1 it worked quite well.
I tried hours to find configuration switches which could be wrong.
Sorry to hear that. If it worked prior to upgrading that tells you are trying to use it the way it is supposed to be used. What is you OS and did you upgrade jre for OWB v2.1?
Do you have another PC available where you could do fresh install.
If your loading pattern is Front it can’t be that. Is your task duration variable and not fixed?
Can you put you project as a rmp file somewhere for me to download?
Yes, JRE is upgraded, OS is WIN7/64
Task duration is variable and here you can download the test project:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4WT1rq_dD3EMGh3VWZzMHZzbnc/edit?usp=sharing
Fact is, that although I did a new calculation the task is still highlighted.
Thank you very much for your help.
I had a few more fields in my view. It sruck me the that before autoschedule the availability/Verfügbarkeit for the resource is 0.0 on the day of the project. Though it is still oveloaded. Looking at the resource properties the availability is 0.00 there,too. Setting that at eg 8.00 will allow to schedule the proejct. See
Thats it! You are the greatest! Thank you very much.
I don’t know why resource availabilty was set to 0.
The resource was created without any additional configuration.
Is there a way to share the same custom view with other users on other PCs? Once I save the view file, my other user cannot save it in the en directory. I don’t see my own saved views in the en subdir. I’m confused. Any way to do it?
You can place the view file on a shared network drive. Preferably mapped to be accessed with a drive letter. The users who have network access can add the view file to their view library.
There is a little on that at
Typically you could create a corporate view library on a shared network drive, put also the Standard.rwl file there.and give users read only access to the folder.
Martti K.
Dear OWB users,
I try to plan a project with open workbench. I have created a network plan for my project, but I would like to see the earliest launching date/ earliest finish date and the latest launching date/ finish date in the my chart because I have to create this kind of chart for my leader. Also the chart should contain the buffers. Is it possible to add this data to the chart?
Laura
I am not sure if this answers your question. You can add task properties fields to CMP view. Open the CPM view and go View > Edit view of click F3. Those early and late start and finish dates. Buffers is not a concept in OWB. There is float though. See
You can have the same fields in a grid view as well.
If that is not what you are after please explain.
Martti K.
Hi I have blanked out weekends (holidays) but when I set a duration of 10 days in the dates the colour still shows up as a weekend working – do I have I to enter lots of separate dates to avoid the weekends showing as being worked?
The working days of the project and the working days or availability days are different things. You set the working days for the project in the project calendar. That is the days on which work can be done on the project. That is if the resources are available. You set the resource availability on the resource calendar. In order the resources to work on weekends on without overload weekends have to be set working days on both calendars before the resources are assigned to the tasks. You would have to select either the individual day cell or a weekday column to make the change into working day.
Slightly touching this is the Gantt bar discontinuity. That applies to the nonworking days of the resource. Nonworking days are not considered for that unless they are adjacent to the custom nonworking days.
See
look at the hours on the first weekend in June
and for discontinuous
I am teaching this software to students, they have pressed the x on the library on the left hand side of the screen, so now it cant be seen. I have no idea how to restore this library back so i can switch between views quickly.
Cheers
You go Tools – Options or Preferences – Options and check View Shortcut Bar.
Hi,
I just installed OWB 2.0 and OWB Views but Menus like Planning, Execution, Controlling and Filters & Sorts are missing. Only Favorites is shown but it’s empty. I really do need gantt chart, which is also missing. How do I get it or install it?
Thank you for your help!
Sounds as if you did the install with a different Windows login than what you are using OWB with.
If that is the case you can either copy the Windows registry settings or you can locate the ..\Program Files\Open Workbench\Views folder and then go to Preferences – Locations and select the Standard.rwl from the EN views for the corporate view library and then User.rwl for theuser libary. Select also one of the highlights files.
Perfect, that helped me. All the groups are shown now.
Thank you!
Help! My mother board died. Got a new computer. Got my HD from my old computer. Cant run OW from the old drive, when I open the exe it wants to uninstall. Downloaded OW to my new computer. Now how do I find my project file. I have searched my old drive by .rmp and nothing found. I have looked through all the OW program files on my old computer but nothing by my project name.
.rmp is the format unless you saved in xml format.
By default the location to save is c:\Programs Files\Open Workbench\Data
You could also try some of the recovery software to see if it finds :rmp files, all of them don’t do.
Eg
Active File recover
iCare
Kroll
Diskinternals Ntfs recovery
They have test versions which you can try to see if they find the files and if they do you can by the cheapest one if you want to.
Hello. When I want to save a new filter I have the message “Attempted an unsupported operation.” and I can’t save the filter. Can somebody help me ? Thanks
Which OBW version, which OS and and how many bits, which jre?
Are you using OWB as the local admin?
User has a Task Status column setup in his OWB view. That column is suddenly blank for some reason. However, if he clicks on the task itself, the status is listed under the Advance tab. The status is also listed in Clarity. We have removed the column from his view and replaced, but same issue. If I open the project from one of my custom views, it is blank to me, as well. But other projects display fine. I’m guessing the project/field is locked or maybe corrupt but I thought I would check to see if anyone knows of a setting that may prevent the field from display. I appreciate any suggestions?
I don’t recall of having heard of anything similar.
Which OWB version and is that stand alone or with Clarity.
I think you have eliminated the view being corrupt and it being related to the user (profile)
If you put the field in another view does it display any better.
If it is stand alone you could try to save the project to another file with another name and another ID and secondly save it to xml and try to reopen those. You could also go through the xml file and see if there is anything fishy.
We are not using it Standalone. We are launching from Clarity. We have the issue on 2.0 and 1.2.1. Yes, we removed the view. We have launched it in several different views/different computers and the info in the Task Status column is blank. Thanks for the suggestions.
You can post this on Global Clarity forum OWB message board, too. If you have Clarity and are on support you can open a case with CA support.
Ok. I can try that. Thanks.
When i auto schedule my project it only shows me up to the end of the next month even though my project runs beyond this… any ides on how to display the whole project duration? Also any ideas on how to change the date format from month/day/year to day/month/year?
Double clicking the timescale should open the settings. Just add more units/periods.
The date format in OWB comes from Windows (regional settings). You can change them temporarily before you launch OWB and the change them back to what ever they were.
Thank you very much! Do you know if you are able to have the phases/ activities and tasks show up on every sheet when printed? I can now extend my program which is great, however as it plots onto several sheets the tasks that the bars relate to are only visible on the first sheet, can this be changed with a setting?
I don’t think you can do that. For a work around see
Click to access TaskLabelsinGantt.pdf
I have just started using Open Workbench, and have created a project with one resource. I am using it stand-alone. I have completed the ETC for each task, and have autoscheduled the project. Everything looks good. However, when I go to Status Update and put in the Total Actual Hours, I can not mark a task complete. I’ve tried deleting the remaining ETC Hours, and still the status shows Started. If I hit F8 to modify the task, the Status and %Complete fields are grayed out and don’t allow me to change. How do I mark a task complete?
No problem marking a task completed when there is no ETC. The Status and %Completed are on grayed out in my project.
What is you OWB version?
Can you share your project.
I am using 1.1.4.
My project is here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_9g5i30d1SjUnpYajBXYmpKNWM/edit?usp=sharing
No problem setting the status completed on those two tasks that have actuals and no ETC. Neither is the status greyed out. (OWB 1.14) The first thing that comes into my mind is that the %Complete is Tools Options is user entered value. Should not make a difference to setting the task status.
There is a newer version of OWB at
http://www.itdesign.de/en/support-download/downloads/
ITDesign is the CA partner currently doing the development of OWB.
Dear Workbenchers,
I was wondering if there is any possibility to interface open workbench with excel. More specific, is there a way to create some kind of macro’s as possible in Microsoft Project? Or are there any other API’s that directly communicate with OWB?
Kind Regards,
Abnd
The short answer is not. There are no macros in OWB.
What you can do is save to XML and open or modify that.
When there was an OWB community in mid 2000’s there was and OWB to MS Project XML interface by Dietmar Hiller and even a GUI for that by D Landfried. I cannot locate either in the net anymore. THe only thing left is the OWB booster
http://sourceforge.net/projects/owbooster/
The community that uses OWB is CA Clarity community, They can export to Excel from Clarity and don’t need OWB interface.
If you don’t do that on a regular basis but just occasionally you could simply copy the cells.
Martti K.
Hi. I’m a long time user of OWB and I’ve run into an error that I just can’t figure out. I am trying to run autoschedule for one of my projects but I’m getting this error: “com.niku.cse.exceptions.SECyclesDetectedException”. I can still update the project, change tasks, make assignments, etc, and it saves ok. It’s just autoschedule that it won’t do.
It’s only happening on this one project. Had a coworker try it on their machine and they got the error as well. Saw a post on another site where someone said to check external dependencies, but my project doesn’t have any.
Help?!
Is that stand alone or with Clarity? Which version of OWB? If there is earned value calculation method attribute is that something other than manual?
Can you share your project file.
Martti K.
Hi Martti,
It is with Clarity. My version of OWB is 1.2. Te EV calculation is set to manual (which is our default for all projects). Yeah, I can definitely share the file. Do you want to email me at lbeck@advsol.com with your email address and I’ll send it over? Thanks!!
I emailed you my email. As a Clarity user you also have the options to open a case with CA support and to post on the OWB message board in the Global Clarity user community message board.
Martti K.
Thanks Martti for your amazing help! Adding the fix here in case anyone else runs into this issue. This was due to one milestone where I had multiple dependencies and one or more of those dependencies was causing the dreaded cycle. Martti told me if I removed those dependencies then autoschedule should work again. voila. it worked. he also suggested that to add them back in, I do so one at a time and re-run autoschedule after each one so I know if I’m going to create the same problem. Thanks Martti!
I have question. I enter the ETC . when the actual is entered ETC gets decremented. Fine. Some times the person overbooks and I would like to know what the ETC was. As the ETC gets decremented, I do not know what we started with. ETC Any suggestions? Thanks.
That is what the baselines are used for: To see what the plan was when it was created when the plan lives through the project life cycle. An option is to store the ETC in a user defined field.
Martti, Thanks for a quick answer. The problem is we have theesources booking on a weekly basis. PM on a weekly basis reviews and is at a loss to know who bokked what hours, especially if the reource overbooks. ETC becomes just 0. Thanks.
Unfortunately stand alone OWB has its limitations when used as a group tool eg. there are now user rights so everything is based on trust.
If you (or the PM) has set the ETC at assignment level and have a timescaled view at assignment level actuals.then each resource has his or her own place for entering them and if they actually do so there should be no confusion who did what.
See http://www.nbl.fi/that_man/Images/Timesheet_view.JPG
I’m trying to use the auto schedule in open workbench on Clarity 12.1.0. I have Resource Constraints, Honor Constraints on Started Tasks, and Schedule Assignments on Locked Tasks checked on the dialog panel. The program is giving me an error: com.niku/cse/exceptions.SEInvalidDateException: IDR_DAE_ERROR_IN_AUTOSCHEDULE
Anyone have any ideas or have seen this before..? Thanks in advance.
Have not seen this before.
What you can do is
– post this on the CA Clarity Global user community OWB message board
– if you are on maintenance open a case with CA support and also search the support site knowledge base. Though I did not get any search results with the first attempt.
– google for the error or the parts of it and see if there is any help in the results
– share the project file and I can have a quick look at that
What is teh difference between seemingly similar columns like EAC, NEW TOTAL USAGE and TOTAL USAGE .
Similarly between ETC and pending ETC
Estimate at Completion (EAC) Field
Possible Headers: Estimate at Completion
Data Type: Currency
Default Value: N/A
Description: The estimated cost of resource usage at the completion of a task.
EAC = (Actual + Estimate to Complete) × Billing Rate
Data Model: Created when needed. In Niku Workbench, this is not a repository field.
Total usage = Actual usage + ETC = practsum + prestsum
New Total Usage Field
Possible Headers: New Total Usage
Data Type: Double
Default Value: N/A
Description: Total usage for a resource assigned to a task, taking into account recorded Actuals, Estimate to Complete usage, Pending Actuals, and Pending Estimate.
New Total Usage = Actuals + Pending Actuals + Pending Estimate
Data Model: Created when needed. In Niku Workbench, this is not a repository field.
ETC
Estimate to complete, the estimated work effort in the future prestsum
Pending Estimate to Complete Field
Default Header: Pending ETC (Estimate to Complete)
Data Type: Double
Default Value: Calculated
Description: The value in this field represents the sum or the proposed or “pending” estimate to complete.
In Niku Time, a resource can change this amount from its calculated default to communicate a difference between what the project manager planned for the task and how long the resource expects to work on the assignment. The project manager can edit it in the project file.
Data Model: PRAssignment.prPendEstSum
Are there any methods to export to iCal? I would like to be able to sync my desktop calendar with the schedule created by OWB but am not savvy enough to figure it out on my own.
If you are using stand alone OWB I don’t think that is possible.
If you are a Clarity user it is possible with Calendar Integration for CA Clarity PPM
http://www.ca.com/ca/en/it-project-management-services.aspx
which is a commercial product.
Hi,
I like this program, and am teaching myself how to use it, but I learn more by relating and deconstructing than reading.
Does any one have a ‘training’ or ‘sample’ project file they would share with me via email?
Maybe how to build a tool shed or sew a shoe together…
simple, but more than “task1” gets “resource1” at “10 units”, etc
Thanks.
There is commercial training offered by eg CA and ITDesign which offered also a free sample check if that is still available.
http://owbcourses.itdesign.de/course/
If you search Youtube for Open Workbench you get training samples like this from Digital Celerity
Martti is the best available resource. He has been answering all practical questions. This forum has been a great knowledge base, beyond task duration effort resource assignments. OWB by itself is a good project management tool. The power really lies in the views and filters that you can create and customize. With Clarity you may have some constraints imposed that we need to live with.
The confusion sometimes arises as to what views to use for updating fields, llike Gantt or spreadsheet view. It takes a while to understand. Good luck.
Thanks Martii and Art,
I completed the IT provided training module. That was well done.
I liked the features of the 2.0 version shown in training and installed it.
The program fails to start.
Tried the 2.1 version…same result. Beyond my skill to fix.
I will keep working with the 1.1.6 version that will install and run until 2.0 is all sorted out after beta.
What OS do you have, how many bits and which version of jre?
HI Martti K.
I have Windows 7 Professional, 32 bit, I keep java up to date at 7.51…
but I loaded the provided java 6.26 that came with the workbench 2.0…
get an ‘appcrash’ error on launch every time after install.
version 1.1.6 works fine.
I hope this is the right area to post this.
I am discovering the joys of Open Workbench. One frustrating thing is that I created a set of project tasks, then set about defining a resource (me). I originally set me in the category of Engineering. My client preferred that I used the category of Contractor given that I am doing this for them on contract. Simple, I thought. Just edit the details for my resource and that should be it. Wrong.
What I have ended up is with two resources, neither of which are assigned to any tasks, one has the ID of 001, and the other 001-1. I cannot delete either. I can assign either.
How can I delete the resource completely? I do not want to just remove them from the project, I want to be able to delete them completely as I don’t want myself or someone else who might work with the data to accidentally use the wrong resource and screw up the planning.
I am using version 1.1.4 on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Thanks.
I have Windows 7 Home premium English 32 bit, installed as member of the admin group 32 bit jre 7 51, downloaded OWB 2.0 from ITDesign, all installations to standard folders. No problem launching OWB.
Try the download from ITDesign again.
I suspect that the downloads will alwaus be called beta as the final version will be supplied with CA Clarity.
This is definitely better than the sourceforge which kinda dormant.
Regarding the resources welcome to the club.
That is something that happens in the standalone OWB: resources get accumulated every time a project is opened and added to the pool or global resources until at the end all the resources are in all projects.
There is no practical way of deleting them.
The only way I know of is to store every project in xml format and and to delete the pool resources (not the tag just the resources under it) from the xml file.
After that open just one project per OWB session and before adding any resources see if they are in the global resources already.
Are you by any chance the Ian I am connected to in LinkedIn?
Thanks. I’ll have to give it a try. On the LinkedIn query, I am not sure. I can’t find anyone with your username there.
I you don’t see any Martti then we are not connected.
Hi There. I’m just trying out OWB 2.1. I downloaded a getting started e-book from http://www.falchemist.com/e-book-library/project-planning-owb/, which was quite good to show how to set up a project.
I’m having trouble with the range right hand window of my gantt chart. It’s only showing the first 26 days from my project start, even though the example project is over 3 months long. I can’t scroll across to see when the project end date is. All other views, phase level gantt, schedule, etc show the full 3 1/2 month timeline. Can’t figure out how/where to change this. Is there a settings for this somewhere?
Hi Josh. Simply double-click on the time-scale at the top of the screen and it should bring up a dialog box allowing you to change the number and the scale.
great. thanks.
I’m just starting to play with setting up shared resources across multiple projects using a master project and several subprojects.
Is there any documentation out there that you’d recommend for learning these features?
Is there a way to create and save a new subproject directly from a master project? Or do you always need to create a separate new project, save it somewhere, then open your master project and browse to that location using ‘insert subproject’?
I ask as I’m currently in the WBS definition view. When you insert a new task and click on the box to the left of the new task, the dropdown menu shows ‘project’ as one of the options along with task, phase, activity, etc. It is, however, the only option from that menu that you cannot actually select.
Sadly, no. The ‘Project’ option in that drop-down indicates where a sub-project has been inserted. But you need to create the sub separately and then insert it.
The way I see it you can do that in a separate window and save it and the pick up to the master project.
I have multiple subprojects in a master project. Is it possible to allocate days that a given resource is always assigned to only one of the projects? I’d like to assign a person to work on ‘project A’ all day on tues, thurs, fri, and split his time between all other projects in the most efficient way with his remaining time mondays and wednesdays (using autoplan and setting up priorities on remaining subprojects)
i think to do this I would set up multiple calenders. I can open ‘project A’ by itself and assign a resource, assign that resource a calender with tues, thurs, fri as work days, then auto schedule.
Then i would like to open up my master project and assign a monday, wednesday calender to that same resource for all other projects.
It seems like it reassigns whatever calender I assign to the resource in the master project globally across all projects, so then when I hit autoplan again, all my tues, thurs, fri scheduling for that person gets wiped.
Is there a way to do something like this?
Maybe you can do that with pain.
There is only one calendar for projects in OWB and that is applied to all projects which are opened (after making any changes in the calendar) The calendar is not saved. Each resource has his or her calendar, but that does not differential between projects.
What you can do is insert the resource name field in the view after task name in a new field. Then put availability in the timescaled area (you cannot have Gantt there at the same time) Then put the availability ton 0 in those cells where you do not want the resources to work. Unfortunately you have to do that at task level. I am not aware how you could do that at subproject level When you schedule the resource will get workload or ETC only for those tasks and subprojects where there is availability.
I’m new to Open Workbench. I downloaded version 1.1.6 and I have the following two problems that I cannot find a solution to in the documentation:
1. Unable to assign resources. There are no configurable options in any form.
2. In the Gantt view, only Feb and March appear even though I have tasks into April and May.
Any help that you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much!
You assign resources by dragging tasks over to the resources or resources over to the tasks.First click the row selector and the grab by the name. Or you can right clik a task and go Modify and the Resources tab or go Assignments directly from the popup menu.
Just double click the timescale to open the Gantt timescale settings. Select your unit and number of units to display.
Google for Idiots Guide to Open WorkBench
See if you can access and download
Click to access OpenWorkbench_UserGuide_ENU.pdf
Thanks very much for your response. My apologies, I have only been at this two days.
Q1. I cannot create names for resources. In Project Properties, under Team resources, I cannot add anything. Under Global resources, I can right-click and see Add resource(s), but the option is grey-out out. If I go to a task and click on the Resources tab, it is blank and I cannot create any.
I’m trying to following the steps in the PDF, but I’m stuck on step 1:
Create a Labor Resource
1. Open Home, and from Resource Management, click Resources.
The list page appears.
Where is Home? Do I have to install CA Clarity PPM? If yes, could you please send me the link (I was unable to find it).
Q2. Great, thanks! I was able to adjust my calendar to show the correct time period.
Quite right that guide is for using OWB with Clarity. So if you do not have Clarity it is a little bit different. Home page is in Clarity.
With stand alone OWB the simplest way to create resources is to type resource names in the bottom frame under the tasks.
See also the guide on this site
Click to access owb-beginners-guide.pdf
I got it now, thanks so much!
A few additional questions about assigning effort to resources and the calendar.
I have tasks with start and end dates that cannot change. I have assigned effort for each resource/task, but I’m noticing the effort is not being scheduled evenly throughout the duration, which causes some days to be over-allocated and other days at 0.0.
My questions are:
1. How do I evenly distribute effort across a task duration, skipping holidays/weekends? Anything I try with Autoschedule moves my dates.
2. Is there a way to remove weekends and holidays from the calendar or at least have them highlighted in a different colour? From examples that I have seen, highlighting them is possible, but mine do not change. FYI, I’m using version 1.1.6.
Thanks very much!
Basically OWB applies the assignment ETC based on the loading pattern over the duration. What is your loading pattern, how long is the duration and what is the ETC.
Once the ETC is applied OWB does not allow to extend the duration. Fixed duration is a favored work around, but removing the ETC, extending the duration and reaplying the same ETC is the real solution. See
Click to access Extending_task_length.pdf
My recollection is that if you double click the Gantt chart area that will display the options and shadowing weekends or non working days is one of them.
I want a uniform duration, but I’m unable to set that in 1.1.6. Also, I cannot change the calendar formatting. I’m going to download 2.1 and see if that helps. Thanks!
If you want the work effort leveled over the duration of the assignment you should choose contour not uniform. Uniform tries to keep the assignment in continuous and may place it later than contour.
Are you talking about the timescaled view? If you double click the time scale you get to the options where you can change the scale unit, number of units etc.
If you are talking about the actual calendar how that is displayed cannot be modified.
Thanks so much! Contour works very well. Hopefully my last item to figure out is availability. I need to reassign work due to the peaks and valleys over the year because my team has four projects that overlap. I’m using the Schedule view and looking at the availability. I’m having a hard time figuring out the numbers. Are the availability numbers in a percentage? Why are some yellow and others are not? When my calendar is for the week, do I have to change my resources availability from one day (7.5 hours) to one week (37.5 hours). If this is explained somewhere in the UG, feel free to point me to the correct section because I could not find it. Thanks again.
The yellow numbers usually indicate overload, but you can see the precise reason if you look at the highlight definitions.
The project calendar is with 8 hour day when you open OWB or a project schedule. While you can change it for each session they will be in effect after the change you cannot save that in stand alone OWB. Each resource also has a calendar and the changes you make in those calendars are saved if the resource is in the global pool.
You can set the display format of availability in view definition.
Maybe you could add the timescaled availability in the resource section of the Schedule view.
Click to access ResourceAvailTab.pdf
should give you helpp to do that. Then you can set the timescaled availability for each resource in each project as you like and schedule accordingly.
Wow, that PDF made all the difference! I now have all the numbers and percentages that I need. Thanks so much for all your help, I really appreciate it.
Has anyone seen it where you cannot change the “Status” field to started? I am using Open Workbench 2.0.0 tied to Clarity. When I try to change the status in my “Update the Plan” view it is unavailable. I would appreciate any insight into this.
See
https://communities.ca.com/web/ca-clarity-global-user-community/message-board/-/message_boards/message/98155248?_19_redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fcommunities.ca.com%2Fweb%2Fca-clarity-global-user-community%2Fmessage-board%2F-%2Fmessage_boards%2Fsearch%3F_19_keywords%3Dstarted%2Bgreyed%26_19_searchCategoryId%3D0%26_19_breadcrumbsCategoryId%3D0%26_19_redirect%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fcommunities.ca.com%252Fweb%252Fca-clarity-global-user-community%252Fmessage-board%252F-%252Fmessage_boards%252Fmessage%252F111339278%253F%2526%2523p_19%26_19_%23p_19%3D%26_19_formDate%3D1395292497099%26%23p_19&#p_19
What is you % complete calculation method?
If it is not manual, try manual if it makes a difference.
Does OWB have a good way to view available capacity across resources? I would like to create a small number of resource teams, and then be able to see if any members of a particular team have availability during certain periods. I haven’t found a good way to do this in MS Project…
See if
Click to access ResourceAvailTab.pdf
helps
Thanks for the answer. I don’t think this feature addresses my need. Assuming availability of resources is already set up and resources have been assigned to project tasks – then I have new tasks and would like to see which resources are available to assign. That is the view I am looking for.
Which OWB version?
Stand alone?
I’m evaluating OWB – looking for a solution that will provide better visibility into resource allocation – and ongoing allocation adjustments based on changes in task schedules, if that makes sense.
I am starting to think you cannot do that.
The way OWB works – especially the stand alone versions – is that you have a resource pool in each OWB session. See Project properties Resources tab. From there you can pick resource to you project team. The project team displays in the resource area eg in the Gantt chart view.
The total usage and other usage values can be displayed under the Gantt chart. They are calculated from the usage in the project tasks above. That is typically just one project.
The only way to make OWB consider more than one project is to load more than one project at the same time. That effectively makes it a master and subproject. So if you have two existing projects with resources assigned and one tentative load all at the same time. Then modify the view so that instead of the Gantt chart you have timescaled resource assignment ETC in the view and you can see the values for each task and summarized for all tasks at the bottom. Then you can look which resources have availability in a specific timeframe for an assignment in the tentative project.
Not very handy, but OWB was basically a tool for the individual project manager to manage single projects. Maste-subs and project groups were means to stretch that, but then came Clarity which is the commercial CA ePPM system which is designed handles resource planning in multiproject environment.
Thanks Martti. Very helpful.
Seems to work as I thought.
There are a couple of twists though.
When you have a master project and subprojects
– any tasks you add to the end will be added to the last supproject, to get them to the master project you have to insert them to the beginning of the WBS, once created they can be moved the end
– if you add the resource field to the task list view to display the resource assigned to each task (like in the resource assignment view) you loose the collapse/expand button and the wbs’s of the subjects are always wexpanded
– the resources of the subprojects are in the team resources of the master project, but their availability is not editable. you would have to set the availability at the subproject level
There is resource unused availability which displays eg timescale unused availablity and thus helps to decide how much ETC (timescaled) you can assign to the unassigned tasks in the old or new tasks in the master or subprojects.
The resource quick filter in the tool bar and Resource LOA help to display on the data currently being worked on.
The biggest down side is that you have to have all the projects in one master project which is a performance issue and also cumbersome to handle and navigate.
Hi Folks,
I am new to Open Workbench. I am hoping to use this as a scheduling tool for high variability low volume make to order environment. Is it possible to do scheduling on an hourly basis instead of daily using this software?
Thanks!
Hi All,
I am new to OWB. I am trying to use the same resources in few different projects. How can I check if they are available for tasks if Project2 if I already have them assigned in Project1. Is there anyway Projects will interact? Any reports? Should I create Subprojects intead of new Projects?
The stand alone OWB is file based and handles the data that is currently loaded into it.
In other words OWB does not consider the assignments and allocations to other projects than what the ones that are currently loaded to the current project
There was a reporting addon a few years ago. I do not know off hand it it is still available. Normally you only have the views which are very versatile.
If you want to take into consideration resource usage in other projects the ways you could work around involve manual work.
Yes you can create a master project with subprojects, but when you schedule you are likely to schedule all. You could schedule a project and have the resource effort scheduled. Then you could load that and the new project as subprojects and see what is the usage and unused availability and make a record of that (screenshot or copy to Excel). Then restart OWB and open the new project only and manually set the availability.
Note that the stand alone OWB creates a shared resource pool which stored with every project file you save and gradually in all of your projects. To minimize the effect of that you can work on one project only and relaunch OWB before you start working with another one. To be better aware of the pool resources use and display resource ID’s. You can see the pool resources in the project properties on the resources tab in the bottom window.
If you have Clarity you manage the simultanous use of resources in different projects with the funtionality in resource planning.
Hi all, are there any informations regarding the future of OWB? Will there be new versions and development by itd design? Thanks and happy new year.
The latest on that is what I heard in the Clarity user group meetings in January last year: CA is taking back the further development of OWB because that is a product they deliver and therefore want to have control of it.
The latest OWB (2.1.2) came out a couple of months ago with Clarity 14.1.
It still says ITDesign on the about image.
On ITDesign site the the version available for down load is 2.1 beta.
You can access the latest OWBV user guide in the CA PPM 14.1 bookshelf
https://support.ca.com/cadocs/0/CA%20Clarity%20PPM%2014%201%2000%20%20On%20Premise%20-ENU/Bookshelf.html
Select O
Hi Martin, thanks for your kind response. Is there any way to download OWB 2.1.2 without having Clarity?
I don’t know any way. ITDesign is the only place where they have more recent OWB versions for download and they do not have .2.1.2
Hi Martin, hi all, is there any idea of the future of a free available Open Workbench? I talked to CA, asking them how to get OWB 2.1.2 and they answered me, that OWB will not be separately available from Clarity. Will ITD release any further OWB releases? It seems not to be.
I do not know any more than you do. If CA says it will not be available then it will not.
While ITDesign was doing the development apparently they could release beta versions.If CA has taken over the development then ITDesign should not be able to release new betas.
You could ask them.
Is there any way to show the name of the chosen baseline in a view? (code, name or description)
Otherwise I do not know which baseline is used in view and gantt.
Thanks
I am afraid the answer is no.
If you look at the baseline fields you can add to a view the project, task and resource fields are like time, duration or cost.
The best I can think is Baseline time for resources. I have not used or tested that so I don’t whether or not that is the date when the baseline was set or something else. If that is the date an you don’t set more than one baseline per däy and keep a code book of the dates and baseline versions that might be a work around.
Unfortunately OWB will not open my rmp project file any more. “Cannot open ….. An error occured” (translated from german message) Does anybody has an idea how to fix a rmp file?
Sorry to say no. I have not seen or heard about any way.
People used to run into that problem every now and then while there was the Openworkbench community.
Frequent saves, backups and also in other locations was the precaution.
Unzipping the rmp file would give the components and in a few isolated cases (if any) it was possible to combine a working file from two version, but normally not.
Hi Martin, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I found no way to repair my rmp file. This will cost me some hours this sunday evening to rebuild the project from printouts 😦
Hi,
I have been using Open Workbench for planning and monitoring software development projects. I very often come across this issue while doing a Baseline.
For Eg: When the ETC is 0, Baseline is 100 Hrs and Actuals are 130, in this scenario, when we baseline the project, Baseline Hrs are overwritten as 130 instead of retaining it as 100. This is making the Effort Variance 0, giving a wrong picture on the project performance.
Please let me know how to restrict baseline to over write my baseline hours with actuals.
Thank You
Raj Kiran
As I posted on SourceForge that is the standard behaviour how baseline works. Baseline is actuals + ETC. You are not supposed to change the baseline other than with the steering committee’s approval. For the personal interest of the PM new baselines can be taken (at least in newer versions of OWB) and baselines can be set on selected tasks only.
I some of the documentation I have found, they refer to the Timesheet view. The installation that I have does not have that view. I have been trying to define the view by file no way to insert the time scale element. Is there a repository of views existing for the purpose of sharing? I might be able to find that view there. Alternatively, if someone could help me define a timesheet view, it wold be greatly appreciated.
I have found a way around. I have made a copy of one of the existing views that has the structure that I want and modified it.
There is no such view out of the box in any version of OWB that I know of.
Attachment are not allowed here so I can’t post my version.
Hello, We just migrated from OWB 1 to OWB 2.1 with Clarity (i don’t know the minor versions) and we lost the resource availability in the main ETC view (section on the bottom right).
Do you have an idea why ? What would be the correct way to set up the views ?
Many thanks in advance.
Click F3 to enter edit view and add the column by dragging it from the Resources fields.
If you post in CA PPM community (Clarity) you can have attachments.
Hi, thank you for your reply, but that’s just it, the cells stay empty.
As a matter of fact, with further investigation we found out that when we open a simple project, the info is displayed. It’s blank only when we open master projects (a project having subprojects).
This would indicate that the view is in fact correct, just that the resource availability isn’t calculated when there are levels in the project hierarchy.
I found this case:http://www.ca.com/us/support/ca-support-online/product-content/knowledgebase-articles/tec614117.aspx
we installed the patch but it doesn’t seem to fix the issue. Have you ever seen such a thing and/or do you have any idea ?
Thank you.
Ok actually the patch does fix the issue. It fixes a lot of issues, I’d recommend everyone on 13.3 to install it.
The last remaining issue is how slow it all is, especially OWB …
thanks for your help
I just upgraded to Windows 10. OWB does start anymore. Anybody experienced this too? Does anybody have a solution?
What happens when you try to launch OWB?
Which OWB verison?
With Clarity or not?
Is roll back to older Widows version an option?
Martti, sorry for the delay:
1. When you start the application from the menu; nothing visible happens. If I try to open an rmp file, I get “There was a problem sending the command to the program.”
2. Version 2.1 beta
3. How can I tell?
4. No.
I downloaded the highest version (2.10) from the ITDesign. Installed it and the jre that comes with it using a non Microsoft account in E:/Program files.on Win 10 32 bit and made a shortcut to the desktop. No problem launching OWB from the shortcut or start menu.
Sounds like your OWB installation did not go through the Windows upgrade.
I suggest uninstalling it and reinstalling it to a directory where your user ID has permissions to read, write, change etc.
Clarity or CA PPM as it is called now is an Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system from CA which comes with CA version of OWB and connects with Clarity. and its database. Sounds like you do not have that. If you had and were on maintenance you could ask CA support for help.
Hi Guys, I set the default unit in “hours”, but when I set the duration in the task it assumes “days”.
Is there something I am doing wrong or failing to do?
Duration in OWB is always days and you cannot change that. Consider it a difference of two dates.
I want to know whether it can generate alerts(popups when there is a delay) and has the feature of multiple projects or not. It would be so great of you if can share all the features of OWB, so that I can work on it and learn better.
It doesn’t do pop-ups, Divya, but it does do multiple projects. Many (most?) of the features and functions are described in the various guides on this site. Start with the beginner’s guide and then read through the articles on the site. My friend Martyi, who does most of the work, also has some links to other sites in various comments.
Does it give alerts when there is a delay or something to let you know about the process?
Sadly, no-it doesn’t have an ability to generate proactive warning messages. You would need to set up views and filters to check for delays or other discrepancies or anomalies.
Hi, is it possible to generate a view from the resources point of view?
e.g.:
+ Ress x
Task 1 (some data regarding usage of Ress x and Task 1)
Task 2 (some data regarding usage of Ress x and Task 2)
Task 3 (some data regarding Ress x and Task 3)
+ Ress y
Task 1 (some data regarding usage of Ress y and Task 1)
Task 2 (some data regarding usage of Ress y and Task 2)
Not that I am aware of.
It is minimal what can be done:
The task section can be limited to one line only and left blank, but cannot drop that completely.
You can put resource name and ID in the first columns in the resource sections.
The only data element related to individual tasks you can put the resource area of the view is assignments which displays the ID’s of the tasks the resources are assigned to. All other data elements that can be put there are a project level.
You can only place task related resource data in the task section, but is not what you are after.
(Can’t post images of attach fiels here)
Hi all,
I tried to import an OWB 2.1 XML file into projectlibre or ganttproject but unfortunately it will not work. No error message and no import of projectdata.
Has anybody an idea how to do that?
Thanks so much
Can you try copy paste from the GUI?
good idea, better than nothing 🙂
The structure of the project will not be copied, also ressources etc.
In OWB you can design the view to have all kinds of data including the resources so the capability depends on how you can configure the view in the other tools.
You could also try to convert the xml file to a format that can be read by the other tools.
When the Openwrokbench.org was still there there was a OWB to MSP converter for xml files developed by Dietmar Hiller and even a GUI for that. The Gantt Guy wrote a document of the process using the converter in organization in 2008. Looked at one of the tools you mentioned and it can read MS Project XML files.
Hi All,
I am using the OWB along with Clarity.
When I am deleting ETCs of any resource through OWB, in clarity Financial Status field is getting set to blank, which was having value as open before doing this activity.
Has anybody an idea why its happening?
Never seen anything like that.
Which Clarity version?
Which OWB version?
I take it is labor resources and project financial status – right?
Which browser and Windows version and bits?
You might get an answer better in
https://communities.ca.com/community/ca-clarity/content?filterID=contentstatus%5Bpublished%5D~objecttype~objecttype%5Bthread%5D
if you posted your question there with the above data and some screenshots.
Hi Support team,
Would you please check this case and give me an advice what can I do to fix it.
Test environment:
– Germany language
– Date format is set Deutsch
– There are 2 accounts: Administrator and standard User1
Test case 1:
– I installed the Open Workbench app by Administrator privilege and able to launch it successfully under this account.
– However, on User1, I got this warning message https://screenpresso.com/=RQg6f
– It still happens even if I added this User1 to Administrator group with full permission on Registry and %ProgramFiles(x86)% as required.
Test case 2:
– I installed the Open Workbench app by System privilege (via SCCM deployment).
– I got the same above issue when launching the app on both Administrator and User1 accounts
Workaround:
– After investigating, I found the way out to fix both cases above by changing DATE FORMAT from Windows (regional settings) to USA format before the first launch (check https://screenpresso.com/=Y9ZYc for detail). The way seems to be similar what your team suggested on https://workbenchwarrior.wordpress.com/open-forum/ – “The date format in OWB comes from Windows (regional settings). You can change them temporarily before you launch OWB and the change them back to what ever they were.” So I would like to get your confirmation if the following things are vendor designed or what can we do to get it fixed by pre-configuration/modification of exe/msi installer without changing Date format from end-user side?
1. By default, the app only run successfully with user that installed it
2. At the first launch, it requires DATE FORMAT is set as USA. Otherwise, a warning message above will always popup every time the app launched
Thank so much for your support in advance,
BR,
Harry P
What OWB install does is creates registry entries for the user who does the install. These include the locations of the view libraries and default views.
If another user is using OWB the settings can be done in the preferences.
So just look and record what they are for the admin and then manually do the same setting for the other user.
As far as I have seen the date format has nothing to do with the error. Changing the regional setting temporarily allows to OWB to open with a different language than the default and have the desired date format.
Dear OWBW,
I had started build a plan in OWB. I have added some dependencies into the plan however the dependencies add new (undesirable) extra rows to the gantt chart that are blank and just extend the link. Do you have any idea why this might be occuring?
I’ve tried deleting the second grid row in the View Definition window, accessed by clicking on Edit View, but can’t delete the second. Any other tips of removing this extra spacing from the dependencies.
Thank you!
Would you like to post a screenshot or link to the screenshot.
I am working on Clarity 15.1 version.whenever I start working in Open workbench, I have to adjust the column and row width. When I close the session, and start again, I have to again adjust the row and column width. Is there any solution to it?
Saving the view should store your settings. If you do not see Save in the Library group the press F3 and make a minor adjustment. When exiting after that OWB will ask if you want to save the changes and replace the current view or create a new.
having a new laptop, and don’t find anymore where to download the owb.
it’s still the greatest scheduling tool for pm
Martti K still reading these messages, any idea for a site where to donwload?
This issue has been solved privately as it takes four days for these posts to become public.
It does not look good for OWB users (that are not Clarity users who get OWB with Clairty)
There is more Openworkbench.org
On sourceforce there is still OWB 1.1.4
With Google you can search for OWB 1.1.6 downloads
Those require 32 bit jre 1.5 to be installed.
The ITDesign download page for OWB 2.x is no longer public.
With OWB 2.x you have the advantage that it comes with the jre installer.
With luck you can still search and find openworkbench.setup.
I am not sure if they should still be there as they are not official.
For support you go to Broadcom CA PPM communities, create an acoount there and post your questions.