Craiova, Dolj -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/31/2009 -- Stand By Soft has released RationalPlan 3.15, a strong project management software application developed to assist project managers in creating plans, tracking progress, allocating resources, managing budgets and analyzing workload. The new version comes with a major change in its planning and scheduling mechanism, an easier to use interface and some more useful features.

Important changes of this version:

* Changed the scheduling mechanism such that it will allow users to have conflicts
* Added shortcut icons for the guide when hidden
* Copy/paste tasks with assigned resources
* Added successors tab in task details view
* Export more data to Excel
* Bug fixes

RationalPlan changed the scheduling mechanism. such that it will allow users to see the list of conflicts from a project. With this feature project managers have the possibility to allow temporary conflicts in the project. This is useful mainly when they want to have different project planning scenarios. The new algorithm is more flexible letting the manager choose the way he wants to handle a conflict or if he wants to keep that conflict from one reason or another. Conflicts are signaled on the Gantt chart and the managers can easily navigate through the list by selecting the desired conflict to handle it.

RationalPlan has a built in Project Guide to help managers take the best planning decisions. Once RationalPlan users become more familiar with the product this guide is less useful and can be hidden. Still there are certain views that can be accessed only from this guide. Hence for the case when the users hide this guide the developers of RationalPlan added some short cut icons for fast access to the hidden views.

With this version the cut/copy/paste actions for tasks where improved. RationalPlan is now able to keep tasks assignments when copying and then pasting them. In this way certain projects can be used as templates for new projects. The new projects will use the same resources as previous ones and this is a good thing because if the old projects where successfully completed then there are bigger chances for the new projects to succeed.

Managing task dependencies was never easier with RationalPlan. Now project managers can manage not only the list of predecessors for a task but also the list of successors. Now they can see for which activities a task is waiting for and also the tasks that depend on a certain task. This way the scheduling path of a project is easier to be managed.

More project data is now exported to Excel files. Some bug fixes where also treated in this version.

RationalPlan suite includes:
RationalPlan Single Project - project management software for single projects
RationalPlan Multi Project - project management software for multiple projects, projects that are interconnected through dependencies and share common resource
RationalPlan Project Viewer - free project management software viewer, the perfect solution for anyone (from project stakeholders to team workers) to view projects details

RationalPlan is designed as an affordable alternative to Microsoft Project with some extra-features like multiproject management and it is covering project management area from WBS construction, project planning and scheduling to critical path management, over allocated resources detection, progress tracking, cost estimation, etc. Gantt chart support as well as various time line reports are also provided. It offers the most important capabilities of a good project management software while being able to operate on various platforms starting with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and all other Java enabled platforms.

RationalPlan Project Management Software is available at http://www.rationalplan.com. It can be download from http://www.rationalplan.com/download.php.

About Stand By Soft
Stand By Soft was founded in 1997 as a software company specialized in building desktop applications and components.

Address: Aleea Parului, Nr.4A, Craiova, Dolj, 200346, Romania
Email: marketing@rationalplan.com
Phone: +40727159969
Contact: Ioan Lucian