Ocean Consulting GmbH
Ocean Plan Viewer

For the planner

You publish it once. They all work from it.

Everyone on the project uses the plan. Only you can change it.

Half a project team has no Microsoft Project licence and no reason to want one, so the plan reaches them as a PDF that is stale the next day, or as an .mpp they cannot open. Exporting it as XML solves both, and costs you two clicks.

Publishing a plan

  1. Export it

    In Microsoft Project: File → Save As, then XML Format (*.xml) as the file type. German interface: Datei → Speichern unter, XML-Format (*.xml). The .mpp stays yours; the XML is the copy you hand out.

  2. Put it where they can reach it

    An attachment works. A path on a network share works better. An address on the intranet works best, because the viewer opens an http or https address directly — so the link you circulate once keeps showing the current plan every time you replace the file behind it.

What stays yours

An export is a snapshot of the version you chose to publish, at the moment you chose to publish it. Nothing about handing it out moves control of the plan.

One version in circulationReaders see what you published. There is no second copy with somebody's local edits in it, because the viewer cannot write to a plan.

You decide whenNothing is live. The plan on your screen and the plan they read differ until you export again, which is how a published document is supposed to behave.

Notes go with itThe text you wrote on a task is there in full, so the explanation stays on the task instead of in a separate mail.

No account to grantNobody has to be given access to anything. Reading the file is the whole of it, so there is no list of people to maintain or revoke.

What the readers need

One file, which they run from their own folder. Nothing is installed, so nobody has to raise a request before they can look at your plan.

  • Windows, Linux or 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS
    One download each, no installer, no runtime.
  • No licence, no account, no administrator rights
    They unzip it and run it.
  • Nothing sent anywhere
    The only network request it makes is the address you gave them.

The page your readers will want is the home page. What the viewer shows them → · What their IT department will ask →

Why we built this project viewer

Ocean Consulting GmbH has worked on banking data warehouses, mobile-operator migrations and datacenter moves since 1999, writing the plans and steering the teams that worked to them. The viewer was built in 2018 on one of those projects, because half the team could not open the plan they were working to.

Consulting projects →

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