>>>Our company seems to have outgrown the outlook task manager as means of scheduling workload. We need something better to determine who does what and when tasks are due. What good collaberative scheduling tools are out there -- possibly with some level of load balancing? If someone is accidentally assigned 40 hours worth of work to be fininshed by the next day, it would nice if the machine could catch this logical impossibilty. Especially since some of our younger, more enthusiastic guys will try to meet the deadline, rather than complain.
>>
>>
>>MS Project 2000 is used down here. It allows scheduling and such with notifications and acceptance by the assigned developers. It is a webbased solution.
>>
>>Pat.
>
>We will look into that.
>Thanks
>
>Gar

And FWIW, it integrates with Outlook fairly easily.

The Project Manager controls everything in MS Project but sends out task assignments to others using e-mail. When you receive a task, you can either accept it or reject it with changes. This gets sent back to the Project manager. If you accept it, it automatically gets added to your task list in Outlook where you can kepp track of your stuff.

There is one add-in you have to install so Outlook will know if an incoming message is an Outlook object or a Project Task object.