Project Timeline Overview

The Project Timeline activity center enables the project team to view, log, and manage:

• Project milestone dates;

• Phase start and end dates;

• Project meetingsProject meetings include phone calls, client meetings, contractor meetings, conversations, conference calls, tasks, site visits, and any other custom meetings that may have been added to the project. ;

• Holidays;

• Project items created, closed, or due within a selected range of the project timeline.

• The due dates of action items, RFIs, and submittals.

Project Center administrators can use the Project Timeline activity center to create, modify, and delete phases, milestones, and holidays.

Any project team member can use the Project Timeline activity center to:

• Create, modify, and delete project events;

• Add items to the timeline that are assigned to specific team members, or to the internal project team.

• Quickly view key project-related milestones, phases, and events in a calendar, journal, or log view;

• Display milestones on Info Exchange as a list with a button to import to a personal calendar. To publish a project's timeline to Info Exchange, see Share the Project Timeline with External Project Team Members or Other Contacts.

• View a summary of project activity during selected timeline intervals.

You can use the Project Timeline activity center alongside a project planning tool such as Microsoft Project, but is not meant replace it. It provides a way for project managers to share project schedules with the entire team, as many of these users may not have access to other project planning software.  

Meetings added to the Project Timeline activity center are automatically added to the Meeting Minutes activity center, and vice-versa.

Importing and exporting project timelines

Importing and exporting  from spreadsheets

You can use .XLS (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) or .ICSICS is a standard calendar file format that Project Center uses to import/export calendar information in the Project Timeline activity center. There are many applications (including Microsoft Outlook) that can import or export this file format, so users can use the applications to create calendars, export the .ICS file, then import it as a holiday file in the Project Center Administration activity center. The .ICS file also stores current and future project calendar information. files to pre-populate project timelines. Project Center administrators can enter a file of type .XLS or .ICS in the Servers tab of the Project Center Administration activity center, which will add holidays to all projects on that server, or they can add the file to each individual project using the Edit Project Settings dialog box, which will override the one entered in the Project Center Administration activity center (if one was added there). Files added in either of those two locations will only add holidays to the Project Timeline activity center.

You can also import a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a project in the Project Timeline activity center using the Timeline Utilities > Import > Events from Excel Spreadsheet task. Importing a file in this way will add project milestones, events, phases, and holidays to the new project. The new holidays added will be in addition to any already added by the previous methods (existing holidays will not be overwritten).

You can also export .ICS files from the Project Timeline activity center. See Share the Project Timeline with External Project Team Members or Other Contacts.

.ICS files only store information for the previous three months.

Importing items from Microsoft Project

If you use Microsoft Project, you can import .MPP files into the Project Timeline activity center at any time so that all Project Center users can view project plans. Use the Timeline Utilities > Import > Items from Microsoft Project task to import items from a Microsoft Project plan. Importing a Microsoft Project plan will add its milestones, tasks, and phases to the Project Center project.

Additional information

• Project timeline milestones, events, phases, and holidays are supported in Search. If the text you are searching for is in any timeline items, the items will appear in the Search Results window.

• You can drag and drop timeline items as well as copy and paste them from Microsoft Outlook into Project Center, and from one instance of Project Center into another instance of Project Center.

• You can add Project Center items to existing project timeline milestones, events, phases, holidays or other project items in the Journal view of the Project Timeline activity center. To do this, just select the Project Center items you want to add to another project item from the Project Items section at the bottom of the Journal view, then click Relate to > Another Project Item from the Project Item Tasks panel.

• The due dates of submittals, RFIs, and action items appear in the Journal and Calendar views of the project timeline.

• You can filter the Journal and Calendar views of the project timeline by day, week, month, quarter, milestones, phases, events, project team members, RFIs, submittals, and action items.

• Email messages filed to a project appear in the Project Items section of the Journal view. You can also filter the list to show only email messages. When you select an email message, the Email Tasks panel appears.

• You can set the times on timeline events in one minute increments.

• You can add sub-phases to phases, and expand and collapse phases that have sub-phases. Use the Related Items tab of the Create Phase dialog box, the Modify Phase dialog box, and the Log view to add sub-phases.

• You can set whether to display milestones and phases on the Info Exchange timeline calendar. You can also control whether or not to show specific event types.

• You can set the colors of each event you add to the timeline.

• External project team members can only see timeline items on Info Exchange that they are involved with.

• You can import, drag and drop, and file recurring appointments, events, and meetings from Microsoft Outlook into the project timeline. Recurring items are indicated by the icon in the Create Meeting dialog box.

• You can file appointments, meetings, tasks, and journal items from Microsoft Outlook as project timeline events.