Fast
Track Schedule 6.01
Fast
Track Schedule 6.01
| by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club An increasingly important genre of computer software, project scheduling, is now attracting major attention in today’s business. The many steps in key business processes can now be better managed and controlled using these exciting new applications. Coordinating projects demands managerial control over time and resources, and the more complex the project, the more expensive and time consuming it becomes. This has resulted in a need for a project scheduler program to help with these critical management responsibilities, and as always, problems are opportunities for entrepreneurs. Tracking tasks, compiling costs and expenses, and managing people involved in business projects are all made more manageable when using a project scheduler, and now there are quite a few alternatives on the market that can be considered the right tool for the job. For a few years, Microsoft’s Project was a significant player in this field, since they were early into this market with their application. Because of the ubiquity of Microsoft Office in business, Project has naturally become one of the more well known applications in this growing field. However, the entrepreneurial spirit still prevails, resulting in many dynamic firms working on project scheduling software designed for simplicity and ease of use. In 1988, AEC Software entered the project scheduling market with this focus in mind, and with their latest release of Fast Track Schedule, v. 6.01, they have produced an excellent project scheduler application guaranteed to attract attention from Project. New Features: Fast Track Schedule v. 6.01 now offers new time saving automation features, including accessing details of activities from within a single Information Form, entering activity dates in the Express Date calendar, Fast Steps Scripting to automate repetitive steps, and enhancements in filtering options. You can now auto-chain and link new activities as they are entered, store hyperlinks to essential files in a schedule, automatically enter project values, monitor imported data, and very significantly, open AND save files in the Microsoft Project .mpx file format. This key feature is a very wise move by AEC, enabling users to exchange data between Fast Track Schedule and Microsoft Project. Users can now seamlessly acquire data from a Project .mpx file by directly opening the .mpx file in Fast Track Schedule, and a Fast Track Schedule file can now be exported in a .mpx version 3.0 or 4.0 file format. Presentation of the schedule has been improved with colorful histograms and line charts at the bottom of the schedule, for use in charting costs, durations, or other activity values across time periods. All project details can now be displayed directly on bars and milestones in the time line graph. Outline levels, specific activities, or individual projects can be highlighted with colors and patterns that can be individually customized per activity row, and you can create custom headers and footers complete with date, time, file, and page stamps, that auto-align to the left, right or center of the page. Users can now also draw attention to key activities with new leaders. These leaders connect text notes and graphics directly to the start, center, or finish of task bars, and as dates and durations change, these text blocks move with the task bars. Fast Track Schedule is Y2K compliant, a key issue with project schedulers, and includes a spell checker, auto-fit columns, bar and data pointers, time period summaries per layout, layout set-up enhancements, recent files listing on the File menu, enhanced tool tips that pop up when you hover the cursor, and scrolling support for mice with wheels, such as Microsoft’s IntelliMouse. The built-in tutorial is excellent, containing 8 superb sets of step-by-step instructions that if followed, will enable anyone to quickly learn this handy software. There are also over 40 example schedules from all sorts of industries, and these really help prevent having to create a new schedule from scratch. In addition, there are included templates that can be used and then saved with a new file name as a separate schedule. Formatting the time line is as easy as clicking on drop-down options that display a time line in hours, days, weeks, years, or quarters, all automatically, with an Apply button that allows the user to deselect an option if it is not what they want. Start and finish dates are equally as easy to change, by just dragging the time line, or changing these dates in the Schedule, Format Schedule dialog box. Outlining and summarizing activities is also very easy, and you can collapse levels to show comprehensive summary bars, while having access to unlimited outline levels. All aspects of a schedule can be customized, including time scales, durations, columns, rows, and bar styles and milestones. The filtering tool allows quick access, and you can filter on the fly with multi-criteria searches to locate and display related activities contained within outline levels. Printing project schedules is always a key concern and also a major challenge to program developers of this type of software, as real schedules can easily contain hundreds of rows of activities with many columns spread across lengthy time lines. Fast Track allows one to create the best presentation quality schedule. Print Preview in this application is a separate window that displays a schedule just as it will appear when printed. The page image will scale to fit in the new window size, and the preview window is also interactive, letting you add pictures, legends, text blocks and other information to an overlay layer that will not affect the schedule in the main window. Users can also select from Standard, Wall Chart, or Fit to Page options and output schedules to virtually all printers. This Fit to Page option will come in handy when a user wishes to output a large schedule to their selected paper size in their printer. How many others recall the early days of Project, when printing a large size schedule required a post-script printer to handle the scaling commands? Sharing Fast Track Schedule files with others is now more easy than ever. Schedules can be exported direct to Internet or Intranet sites, or pasted into other documents to enhance its presentation. Users can also export a picture of the schedule to the clipboard or to disk. From Page Preview, exporting options include the schedule only, the schedule plus graphic items, or the schedule, its items, as well as an image of the piece of paper. Fast Track Schedule also enables easy transfer of project details to the Web. Entire schedules can now be exported as a .jpeg, .gif, or .tiff image and saved as a Web graphic. A schedule can also be exported as a complete HTML data table with customizable headers, footers, and borders. Other features include the ability to track up to three sets of dates and durations for a single task, define task dependencies, customize the work calendar to account for work time versus non-work time, format calculation fields and column summaries, and real-time collaboration with others on the same project schedule. Collaboration Features in Networked Environments: Collaboration (only in the Windows version) enables team members to work together simultaneously in creating and editing schedules across the Internet or an Intranet. The Collaboration Pro Tool works as a client-server relationship over a networked connection. Any PC running Fast Track Schedule 6.0 can act as a server to share one or multiple schedules. Schedules can be shared either as a file which is open on the server’s computer, or as a file that resides in a location on a server that has been designated as a shared directory. The team members run Fast Track Schedule from their PC and connect as a client across a corporate Intranet or the Internet to the computer serving the schedule. Both the server of the schedule and all clients connected to the schedule have access to a single "Pen," the tool that acts as a "key" to the schedule, providing full control of Fast Track Schedule’s tools, menu commands, and buttons. To add, delete, or move items within the schedule, simply pick up the "Pen," make the changes, and then release the "Pen." The whole team instantly views all changes as these are completed. Clients connected to the shared schedule can even print to a local printer when holding the "Pen." At any time, members can save their own copy of the shared schedule to their local drive. Networking: Fast Track Schedule 6.0 is compatible with all popular networking operating systems and protocols, and is available in 5-user, 10-user, 25-user or custom configured network packs. All network server versions come complete with concurrent-usage monitoring. Tri-level passwording, file locking, and locally stored preferences allow users to maintain their own files or update shared schedules. Network administrators can also establish a global default schedule and global templates by capturing preferred settings for dates, data columns, layouts, filters, sorts, and bar styles and milestones. Also, network server packs are upwardly scalable. Competition: While Microsoft’s Project may continue to dominate this field, Fast Track Schedule is certainly aggressively priced and very competitively configured. However, it is designed around the primary need for developing Gantt charts, and will not support Pert charts or allow more complex resource management features, both built into Project. If you do not need the high power of higher-end project management packages, like Project, then Fast Track may be your best bet. Tracking projects in Gantt charts with revised and actual progress is very easy and it is a very flexible and customizable application that will allow much easier control over the presentation output and printing. The many up and coming project schedulers vary from the very easy, introductory level in Kidasa’s Simplicity, to Kidasa’s Milestones, to AEC Software’s Fast Track Schedule, to the more complex applications such as CA’s Super Project and Microsoft Project. Each is an excellent tool with keen focus on features and capabilities that will relate differently in different types of organizations. With its many new features, and its ease of use, Fast Track Schedule definitely should be considered in many organizations. In major architectural or construction firms however, this program may not have all the necessary tools they need in their complex work schedules. For middle or upper management, Fast Track Schedule presents just the right tool to conceptually manage, control and track their different projects. Price: $199 street price System Configuration Requirements: (WindowsVersion) (MacintoshVersion) (Network Version) Contact: Ryan Kish, Marketing Communications Manager Acknowledgments Thanks are in order to the excellent supplemental material supplied with the review copy of this software that was of great assistance in the preparation of this review. Viewers are encouraged to also seek out other comments and suggestions from the reviews of this application found in the online versions of PC Magazine, PC World, PC Computing, and Windows Magazine. |