Product Reviews

Microsoft's PC-only Project dominates the corporate project management world, but no longer is the Mac a second-class citizen. Among a clutch of excellent Mac-only management applications released in the past year, Merlin 2.5 from ProjectWizards could well be the best on any platform.

The striking thing about Merlin is how well it combats complexity through both a conversational software manual and a helpful welcome window offering a choice of several pre-built project templates. You can tailor these with your own project details such as its objective, working time and budget.

The program's main window is split into three principal areas, dominated by a main table that shows by default a Gantt-style Activity view of the chronological course of a project. It's here that you add and edit project activities and establish dependencies between them.

But you can also view your project in other views: Net Plan, Resource or Utilization. The Net Plan shows an activity-based overview of the same project dependencies but presents a more concise overview of its critical path - those activities that together set the overall duration of the project. The Resource view lists the people involved with the project and their roles, while the Utilization view shows how well those resources are being exploited.

But it's the other two window elements that give Merlin its power. The contents of the Inspector window vary according to whatever is selected in the main table. When a project activity is selected, say, you can adjust its time, dependencies and completion state, and examine any applicable budget in its Inspector. Switch to the resource view and you use the same window to specify a resource's working

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week, chargeable rate and so on.

Merlin's best feature is housed in its Elements window. Here you can build or collate information and attach it to an activity or the whole project. An element can be as simple as a checklist or an attached file, but a risk management element enables you set details of the probability and potential impact of a threat to the project in financial and time terms. You can allocate a reserve for this risk and when the risk element is applied, this is reflected in the costs of the activity or resource.

It's impressively easy to export a Merlin plan to Microsoft Project, Excel or iCal. Merlin doesn't offer perfect Project translation but it's better than any other Mac project management system we've seen. Some data, such as elements, don't translate - but the Activity view reproduces well.

Merlin 2.5 files can also be shared with multiple users on a local network or even over the Internet. Typically Merlin has made sharing data an exercise in simplicity. Just click on the Publish button in the toolbar and the Start button in the resulting dialog box, and the file is shared. You can restrict access by defining networked users as resources and assigning them access rights in the Permissions Inspector window.

We've rarely seen a third-party program work so seamlessly with the Mac's built-in applications either. You can drag contacts from your Mac OS X Address Book into the resources window to add them as project resources and drag email from Leopard's Mail application on to activities to create a new file element.

You can limit the synchronisation with iCal to individual resource calendars so that you can track just your own time in iCal rather than that of the rest of the project team, or the entire project calendar, optionally automatically synchronising after saving. Even better, syncing works both ways, as changes made in iCal are reflected back in the main project. The beauty here is that if you subsequently publish the iCal calendar to .Mac or a WebDav server, anyone can view the project timelines in their web browser.

Given its power, Merlin is very reasonably priced. When the worst you can say about a program is that it suffers from occasional odd spelling glitches in dialog boxes, you know you're on to something good.