Monday morning, a client’s office. You have the plan on a memory stick, eleven people are waiting to know what they are on this week, and the laptop they gave you has Word, Excel and a browser. Microsoft Project is not on it, and it will not be on it: the licence lives with the four people who build schedules, and you are not one of them this month.
So you open the plan on your own machine, squint at it, and start typing eleven emails.
The licence tax on a five-minute job
Telling people what they are assigned to is not a scheduling task. It is a distribution task: read the plan, group the assignments by person, send each person their part. Nothing in that requires the application that produced the file — and yet it usually does, because the only tools that could read the plan lived inside Project.
That is how a five-minute job acquires a licence, an installation, an IT ticket and a version dependency. Not because the work is hard, but because of where the tools chose to live.
The people who feel this most are the ones who never asked for a scheduling seat: the delivery manager who receives a plan and has to run the week from it, the consultant working on the customer’s laptop under the customer’s rules, the PMO analyst whose organisation bought exactly six licences.
Reading a file is not the same as driving an application
There are two ways to get at the contents of a plan, and they are not variants of each other.
The first drives Microsoft Project: an add-in loads inside it, asks it to open the file, and reads the answers. Everything about that path depends on Project being there — installed, licensed, a version that can open that particular file, and not busy with something else.
The second reads the file format directly. SendTask takes this one: it opens .mpp, .mpt and Project XML through MPXJ, the long-established open-source library for project file formats, and pulls out tasks, resources, assignments and the day-by-day distribution of work. It never starts Project, because it never needs to.
The practical consequences are the interesting part.
The plan is only read. Not modified, not re-saved, not locked. You can send this week’s assignments from a copy while the scheduler is still working on the original, and neither of you notices the other.
The version that wrote the plan does not matter. A file produced by a newer Project than the one your colleague has is a familiar annoyance; here it is not a question, because the format is read rather than handed to an application that may or may not understand it.
Nothing lives inside somebody else’s program. An add-in can be disabled by Project after a crash, blocked by policy, or broken by an update. A separate application that installs under your own user, with no administrator rights, has none of those failure modes — which matters mostly on the laptop that is not yours.
Excel is not required either. The timesheet that goes out as an attachment is written directly, so the machine sending it needs neither Project nor Office.
What the eleven people actually receive
Each resource gets one email with their own assignments and a timesheet attached, in one of three shapes you choose in the profile: standard, with actual and remaining work in hours; day by day, with the timephased detail; or percent complete, when all you want back is a number.
Inside the workbook there is an Instructions sheet: the four rules that matter, the exact folder to return the file to, and a link to the full guide. It travels with the file, which is the point — three weeks later, when somebody finally opens it, the covering email is long gone.
One small feature earns its place every single time: resources with no email address are listed on screen, with a warning, before anything is sent. They used to be dropped silently, and silence in a distribution job is the worst possible behaviour: everyone assumes they were told. The plan has the same blind spot one level up: the tasks in trouble are the ones nobody was assigned.
Where it stops
Being honest about the boundary is what makes the rest believable.
SendTask sends. It does not collect the timesheets back and it does not write anything into your plan — on purpose: a tool that only reads can never corrupt the file it was pointed at. Bringing the filled-in timesheets back and updating the schedule is a separate product, GanttTimesheet, which reads the files SendTask produces without any conversion.
You do need a mail account it can send through: the SMTP settings live in the profile, along with the sender name your recipients will see. And reading a plan without Microsoft Project installed is not the same as editing one. If your job this morning is to reschedule, you still need a scheduler. If your job is to tell eleven people what they are doing this week, you need the file and ten minutes.
SendTask reads a Microsoft Project plan from the file and sends every resource their own assignments by email, with an Excel timesheet attached. No Project, no Excel, no add-in, no administrator rights; the plan is never modified. Version 2.0.2, in six languages, with a 15-day trial that needs no key.
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