OnePlace has a great project management feature that is easy to overlook unless you go looking for it or just happen to stumble across it — the ability to create draft projects. A draft project is a project that is only visible to the person creating it. No other members of the team that this person belongs to will see this project or have access to it or any of its sub-projects and tasks within OnePlace. It's like the project simply doesn't exist to those team members.

Draft projects are great for situations where you as the project planner want to take your time getting the plan just right, but don't want to expose any half-baked details to your team as you work on it. The complexity or depth of a draft plan doesn't matter as well. You can create as deep a draft project as you like, and OnePlace will keep track of it for you.

Sounds good, so how do you create a draft project? Creating one is easy — just create a project like you normally would, but choose the "Draft" status option, as shown below. That's all there is to it.

Once you've created a draft project, all sub-projects and tasks that you add to that project automatically are draft as well. In fact, you cannot change the status of sub-projects and tasks within a draft project (the Status option is hidden on Project and Task dialogs).

Each draft project and task is decorated wherever it is displayed in OnePlace using a small yellow "Draft" label, making it easy for you to spot them. The example below shows how this decoration appears when viewing a draft project via the Project Dashboard.

Suppose you're ready to release a draft project to your team, how is that done? It couldn't be simpler. OnePlace provides a special action for this on the project's Dashboard called "Release Project", which is called out in the screen shot below:

When a draft project is released, the status of the project and all its sub-projects and tasks are marked as "Planned", and any system notifications pertaining to the project are fired off to the respective team members (such as task assignment notifications).

If you find that you released your project plan a bit too early, lassoing it and bringing it back to draft status is just as easy. Simply click the "Un-release Project" action button on the project's Dashboard. This will reverse the effects that occurred when you released the project, by making the project and all its sub-projects and tasks draft again. The button for un-releasing a project is called out in the screen shot below:

Hope you found this OnePlace Feature Spotlight useful. Please let us know if there are other areas of OnePlace you'd like to see featured in this blog series, by leaving your comments below.

Have a Happy Holidays Everyone!