MICROSOFT PROJECT 2010 - NEWS FLASH

Microsoft Project 2010 has officially been announced. Now all the people who have been saying to me here at the Project Conference in Phoenix, "Come talk to me on Wednesday," will finally be able to share their impressions. While I'm racing around the show today capturing tips, insights, and opinions on video, here's the rundown captured from the notes I took during this morning's keynote, presented by Chris Capossela, a senior VP with the Microsoft Business Division.

Calling it the "most important release of Project in the last decade," Capossela said the four pillars of the new product line are these:

* Making the end user experience far more intuitive and simpler.
* Doing a better job of collaboration and reporting.
* Providing unified project and portfolio management.
* Providing a scalable and connected platform.

Project Professional

The ribbon, which is built into Word and Excel, makes its appearance in Project Standard and Project Professional. This exposes more functionality to the casual user. Also, in a brief demo, Project Group Program Manager Keshav Puttaswamy showed how project activities can be manipulated with greater ease. He opened up an Outlook message with a list of tasks, which he copied and pasted into a new project plan. Project preserved the formatting. He did quick manual scheduling, entered values (when a conflict surfaces, Project puts a red squiggly line under the offending entry akin to a misspelling in Word, which can be corrected, adjusted, or ignored), then with a click to a checkbox showed all critical tasks highlighted in the plan.

A team planner feature provides a people-centric view of the user's work in the project, highlighting over-allocated resources, unassigned tasks, tasks that still need owners. Puttaswamy did some quick dragging and dropping to manage the resources and then amazingly quickly created a timeline view that could be compressed or stretched and reformatted to his liking. He copied that timeline into a response email to that initial email message, did some additional format tweaking, and it was ready to send out.

Puttaswamy spent a couple of minutes to display new syncing features with SharePoint Server. When people talk about how the new release of Project integrates more tightly with SharePoint, this is what they're referring to. In the demo, he created a new task list, clicked a sync button, and the project was synced with the SharePoint site. From within SharePoint, a user can drill down on a given project plan and view the details of tasks. The plan is also fully editable from within SharePoint. Changes made by team members then flow back into the original plan maintained in Project.

Project Server 2010

Capossela said that Project Server 2010 is built on top of SharePoint 2010. This means, he said, "We can create fantastic dashboards, key performance indicators, better time and status reporting." On the latter, now there's a single interface for time sheeting and statusing -- a component that generated much applause. Web access will now include the abilities to create and edit project plans. He alluded to predefined workflows that allow projects to flow through a standard approval processes. Also, permissions can now be delegated by role.

On the connectivity front, Capossela said Project Server has been integrated with Exchange Server 2010, which means users will be able to tap into project plans as they move from machine to machine or device to device. That includes mobile access for statusing and tasking.

For developers, the company has extended interoperability with Visual Studio. Microsoft announced the Project Server Interface (PSI), which allows partners to tap into Project functionality through other applications.

PSI, said Capossela, will be backward compatible with work done on Project Server 2007. This may be a necessity, since Portfolio Server is going away with the 2010 release. Some functionality from that product -- such as analytics -- will be integrated with Project Server. Details on what won't make the transition are still a bit vague. However, Microsoft may be expecting its partners to pick up the slack through the PSI.

Seth Patton, senior director in the Project group, demoed Project Server, showing off the multi-level undo feature that will be introduced along with additional features that the server release will share with the Standard and Pro offerings, such as the ribbon interface and ability for the user to manually interact with the project plan.

Among the new features: a dashboard function that uses SQL Server Reporting Services. Each role can view its own set of indicators in dashboard form. Also, reports themselves can be edited through Excel 2010, including editing the report, adding new fields, and changing chart types. "You don't need to be a [business intelligence] guru to do that," said Patton. "You need to be able to find the report and render it."

To show the portfolio management capabilities now built into Server, Patton pulled up a collection of projects -- $20 million worth -- and ranked them according to strategic elements: cost, potential return, etc. He then showed how the product can prioritize them when the budget is only $6 million. An Analyzer feature moved some projects out based on relative cost vs. return. He saved that scenario, and then performed a what-if exercise: "What would happen if I added three more resources or moved the start-date out on some of the projects?" The program modeled a new list of projects.

Other Bits and Pieces

Microsoft is dumping "Office" from the product line names. Hallelujah! Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 was a bit of a mouthful. (Of course, since Portfolio Server is biting the dust, it's a moot point there.)

There will be three SKUs, as Microsoft calls them: Project Standard (geared to the casual or part-time user), Project Professional (geared to the professional project manager), and Project Server 2010 (geared to business users beyond the project management folks).