Yes, you too can get a preview of what’s coming in Microsoft Project 2010.  Microsoft has released the beta for Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010.  We’ve seen these products in the office for some time as HMS is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who has the Microsoft EPM Competency plus I worked on Microsoft’s EPM Partner Advisory Council for years and completed my participation on that council only recently. 

But now you can start seeing what will be coming in the new product.

Among functionality that I think will be well received you’ll see:

In Project Professional:

• Timeline View.  This is like the Visio timeline bar that many people like for summary views
• Team Planner.  This interactive view lets team managers drag and drop tasks onto a team member’s schedule
• The ribbon menu (also known as the fluid user interface)

In Project Server:

• Integrated Portfolio and Project Server functionality.  Yes, they’re together at last.
• Project Data Pages.  Not enough has been said about these but I think they may end up being the most powerful aspect of what people will now do with Project Server.  The PDPs let you create forms to gather data and then use workflow to move data into different parts of the EPM system based on the context of the data at that stage of the workflow.

You can find the beta for Project Professional 2010 at: www.microsoft.com/project/2010/en/us/default.aspx.
The Project Server 2010 beta is at: www.microsoft.com/global/project/2010/en/us/RichMedia/secondary/server_home.html.

It’s called “The Stack” over at Microsoft.  It refers to the layers of technology that are required to get the Microsoft EPM functional.  For those who only have experience with Project Desktop this will sound unfamiliar.  After all, what’s to know?  You put the DVD in the box, you hear a whirring sound.  When it’s over the DVD pops out and you start entering tasks in Project. 

 If only Project Server were that simple. 

Microsoft made the decision years ago to leverage the  different technologies that Microsoft produces for its server products.  When we’re asked to deploy the Microsoft EPM “Solution” for Project 2007, here are the Microsoft Products we need to think about:

Windows Server
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Active Directory
SQL Server
SQL OLAP Services
SQL Reporting Services
Microsoft Office
SharePoint Services (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
Project Professional
Project Server
Project Web Access (PWA CALs)
Portfolio Server
Portfolio CALs

That’s pretty much been the list since Project Server was first introduced and later when Portfolio Server was introduced.  With Project 2010, we know the list will change a little:

Windows Server
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Active Directory
Exchange Server
SQL Server
SQL OLAP Services
SQL Reporting Services
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2010 is now required
Project Professional
Project Server
Project Web Access (PWA CALs)

At first glance the list doesn’t seem that different.  The Portfolio Server license is now woven into Project Server and a new option for Exchange Server is added.  But, let’s take a peek below the hood.

In Project 2010 you will need MOSS.  The Project team is leveraging technology available only in MOSS so it’s not an option and the option to use Windows SharePoint Services is discontinued.  Ok, that may have an impact on your licenses or perhaps not but lets think about the impllications.

SharePoint is the fastest growing server product in Microsoft’s history.  A large number of organizations have adopted the platform in its 2007 incarnation.  Let’s imagine that you’ve *just* finished deploying SharePoint 2007 and now Microsoft comes along to explain how great Project Server 2010 will be.  But, in order to take advantage of Project Server 2010, you had to adopt “the Stack”.  That means you’ll need to upgrade your SharePoint from 2007 to 2010.  That may be quite a challenge.  You might have extensive customizaiton in SharePoint 2007 that would have to be migrated.  You might have applications that only work with SharePoint 2007 and not yet with SharePoint 2010 or that might have to be upgraded themselves to work with the new SharePoint. 

Only a version ago, Project Server was viewed as the vanguard; the product that would “pull-through” technologies like SharePoint into the organization.  Now, however, that same link may have organizations think twice about going to the new technology because of the platform they’ve adopted.

Interestlingly I had a conversation about this just last week with my friends at Occam who have been doing Project Server hosting for years.   Hosting the new technology might be an attractive solution for many project offices who are keen for the new technology.  It has been attractive for a minority of users thus far, but if going to a hosted model eliminates the challenge of confronting “the Stack” then it may well be attractive when Project Server 2010 hits the streets next year.

Often when I’m speaking in the blog people assume that when I say EPM System, that I mean one large integrated EPM package.  It’s an easy assumption to make.  But enterprise systems can be made up of a myriad collection of tools and if those systems are accompanied by a strong enterprise process, then they can be very effective.  With the new announcements this week on Project Desktop 2010 it has me thinking.

I teach Advanced Project Management at McGill from time to time and one of the things that I always challenge my students on is to challenge assumptions. And a challenge I love to throw at them is to prove to me that an enterprise system is better than individual systems.  I mean, if you’re an organization, it must be better to be integrated into a single enterprise system, mustn’t it? 

Well, that’s a good question and before we’re done I often have the students make a case for having project management integrated into an enterprise system or leaving individual project managers with their own tools.

This debate comes in handy when I’m consulting organizations who are certain they want to implement an enterprise system. 

“Why?” I’ll ask. 

This often takes them aback.  Aren’t I the salesperson who should be trying to push an enterprise system on them?

“What specific business benefits do you expect to realize,” I ask.  Sometimes the answers are obvious.  By far the most popular request is that the enterprise system help with resource capacity management and forward capacity planning. 

But there are a lot of paths to getting to your goals. 

With the incredible penetration of Project Desktop it’s interesting to think about how effective project managers might be if they continued to manage some of their workload as individuals and collaborated on other elements.

How about this for an idea:

Use Project Desktop as a desktop tool.  Let individual project managers manage their individual projects on their own.

Use SharePoint for the team communication and collaboration that has become so important in today’s fast-paced project management world.  Document management, work flow with forms and list management could all live there.  Even milestone management to track deliverables could be in SharePoint.

Use Excel Services to do resource aggregation at the highest skill level.  It won’t do resource levelling of course but that might not be the biggest challenge.  A graphical representation of resource overloads at the skill level might be enough to overcome the biggest demands of resource capacity planning; determining if there *is* a problem.

With the ability of Project Professional 2010 to now import a list of tasks from SharePoint 2010 and keep that task list synchronized and the new Team View there may be more and more organizations interested in making a Sharepoint/Project Desktop organizational environment.

With all the talking I’ve done about Project Server 2010 and its new functionality, I didn’t want to forget about Project Desktop. The desktop versions of Project 2007 are still divided into two flavours: Standard and Professional but there are a few differences and some interesting new features.

First of all, Standard and Professional 2010 will be available in both 32bit and 64bit versions. If a 64bit architecture doesn’t sound attractive you’ve never loaded a mega project into Project Standard. The great news about a 64bit environment and a 64bit version of Project is that it can access memory beyond the 2GB limit of 32bit. If you are loading large projects or many projects as part of a program then this is a huge improvement.

One change that is common to both Project Standard 2010 and Project Professional 2010 is the Fluent UI – you may have heard this referred to as the Menu Ribbon. This new feature was completely expected since the release of the Ribbon in Office 2007. The ribbon will make the look and feel of Project Desktop match the rest of Office.

The new Timeline view is one of my favourites. It shows a single bar at the top of the screen very similar to the timeline object in Visio that represents the entire project schedule. A zoom control shows how much of the total timeline bar is being shown in the schedule at the bottom. Want to zoom to the 2nd half of the schedule? Want to see the whole schedule? Want to slide forward to the end of the year?

In previous versions of Project Standard vs. Project Professional the major distinction was Project Professional’s ability to connect to Project Server. That distinction is still present in Project Desktop 2007. However, there are several features in Project Professional that will not be present in Project Standard. Microsoft sees this as an opportunity to entice users to move up from Standard to Professional. These “Project Professional only” features include:

One of the other features that’s sure to be popular with Project Desktop 2010 is the enhancement to the copy/paste functionality. Now tasks from Excel can be copied and pasted while retaining formatting and other key data.

Team Planner View
This new view in Project Professional 2010 is a new dynamic view in the desktop application that shows unassigned tasks in one window and above it a list of tasks organized by resource. So a team leader can see the existing work for their team and then drag tasks into the schedule of their team.

Inactive Tasks
A much-requested feature that appears in Project Professional 2010 but not in Standard 2010 is the ability to declare a task as inactive without having to delete it. An inactive task will no longer affect the schedule but it may contain critical information such as actual costs or baseline information that we’d like to maintain.

Sync with SharePoint tasks
Project Professional 2010 will include an ability to load a list of tasks from SharePoint and then to keep that schedule synchronized with the SharePoint list.

What about backwards compatibility?
You’ll be happy to know that Project Standard and Professional 2010 are able not only to open a Project Standard or Professional 2007 with reduced functionality in a compatibility mode and save the files in the older format. The new desktop tools can also open and save data in Project 2000-2003 or Project 98 formats. Project Standard and Professional 2010 can even create a new project and save it in these older formats. Of course some functionality may not be available in these older compatibility formats.

There’s lots more but as you can see there’s been a big focus on the Desktop for the 2010 release!.