Microsoft Office
Project Server

With Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and its clients, your organization can more effectively manage and coordinate work ranging from one-time projects to complex programs across the entire project life cycle. Office Project Server 2007 is designed to be accessible by its clients, Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access.

Gain Visibility and Insight

• Budget Tracking and Cost Resources permit better financial insight and tracking.
• The Proposals capability in Office Project Web Access manages plans and activities prior to project approval.
• The Activity Plan capability of Office Project Web Access helps manage ongoing operations activities after project completion.
• The Reporting Data Service permits easy user reporting with common business reporting tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
• With the Cube Building Service, users can easily select data to build portfolio analyzer cubes, for sophisticated analysis and reporting.

 

• For simple task tracking, use the new Project Task List in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology then import this into Office Project Web Access.
• Enterprise Templates and the Project Guide establish repeatable processes that capture best practices.
• Use familiar tools such as Microsoft Office Outlook for entering progress or Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007 for creating dynamic reports.
• Office Project Web Access and Project Workspaces enable your team to collaborate over the Web.

• Get information about high-level resource allocation for proposed projects with Resource Plans.
• Individuals other than the assigned resource can provide status updates on tasks by using the Assignment Owner feature.
• Timesheets now support fiscal periods. New financial fields, such as cost codes, enable you to report on hours that are separate from the progress made on tasks, and more.
• The Active Cache makes it possible to more efficiently transfer data from Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 to Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and provides a better offline work experience.
• The Queuing Service provides controlled use of server resources, which means better performance for users.
• With Server-Side Scheduling, users can build a custom Web user interface without requiring process schedule changes to be made in Office Project Professional 2007.
• Programs enable easy management of multiple sub-projects and their cross-project dependencies in a coordinated fashion.
• Deliverables help track and manage cross-project dependencies.

Extensible and Programmable

• Office Project Server 2007 now uses the Microsoft .NET Framework to offer your developers a more flexible experience.
• By moving the scheduling engine to Office Project Server 2007, custom front ends no longer require the full winproj.exe on each client machine.
• The Event Model in Office Project Server 2007 supports use of Windows Workflow Foundation to integrate business processes with your project work.
• The application programming interface, Project Server Interface, exposes the functionality and data that your client applications need to integrate with Office Project Server 2007 or to extend its functionality.

1. Enhance Your Business Intelligence
   Office Project Server 2007 helps you monitor performance, visualize trends, manage risks, and identify investment gaps. Use Reporting Data Services to share information through common business reporting tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The pre-built data cubes are extensible, and it provides a data link for building scorecards and dashboards to facilitate informed decisions about existing projects, tradeoffs, and new opportunities.
2. Collaborate and Coordinate Easily.
   Ensuring teams share common goals and work together effectively becomes more vital as organizations become more geographically and culturally diverse. Project Web Access provides Web-based access to timely, business-critical project information stored by Office Project Server 2007, so teams can share knowledge, collaborate smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and adjust activities quickly to accommodate project changes and updates.
3. Manage Resources Effectively.
   Many organizations struggle to deploy resources effectively, leading to higher costs and project delays. Office Project Server 2007 helps you accurately assess needs to effectively deploy resources today and create future plans across your organization — so you have the right people on your high-priority projects for optimal delivery. You can track availability, utilization, and work progress through time sheets.
4. Manage the Entire Project Lifecycle.
   Propose and initiate projects in Project Web Access. Promote these proposals to operational projects, and then manage them through completion and maintenance. You can get a comprehensive view of your organization's work at all stages of the lifecycle for better decision-making.
5. Manage the Simple and Complex.
   For one-time projects, you can use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Project Web Access. As these gain approval or grow into more strategically important initiatives, you can then “promote” them to the centralized Office Project Server 2007 for tracking of budgets and resources that might otherwise go unnoticed. For large scale “programs,” you can easily manage multiple sub-projects and their dependencies in a coordinated fashion.
6. Promote Continuous Improvement.
   Organizations are increasingly standardizing their processes to improve operational efficiencies and more effectively manage project complexity. Office Project Server 2007 enables you to implement repeatable processes as templates, refine them based on your best practices, and capture these improved processes within a custom Project Guide. You can apply an automated workflow, resulting in lowered costs, faster cycle times, and increased quality.
7. Hire Strategically.
   Without understanding long-term workloads and capacity, companies can experience inefficient hire-fire cycles, resulting in higher overhead, lost knowledge, and poor employee morale. By providing visibility into overall work commitments and resource capabilities, Office Project Server 2007 helps you create resource plans to align your strategic recruiting and outsourcing with your long-term business objectives.
8. Get More From Existing Technology Investments.
   Office Project Server 2007 leverages Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Windows SharePoint Services, so you can get the most out of your organization’s skills in these Microsoft technologies. Office Project Server 2007 also includes pre-built integration with the Microsoft Office system, ERP applications, the Microsoft collaboration platform, and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. The well defined Office Project Server API, Eventing Model, and other tools make this a flexible and extensible platform to manage your work.
9. Drive Real Return on Investment.
   By enabling increased employee productivity, faster cycle times, reduced costs, and improved time management, Office Project Server 2007 and its clients provide a positive and sustainable return on your investment. In IT portfolio management, software can cut costs 2-5 percent, improve productivity 25-20 percent, and shift 10-15 percent of budgets to more-strategic projects. In developing and bringing new products to market, the best performers — those who have applied rigorous process and technology to their research and development and go-to-market activities — can reduce time to market by more than 30 percent.
10. Gain a Complete Office EPM Solution.
    You can form the complete Office EPM Solution and gain additional portfolio management functionality using the bi-directional Project Gateway. This allows you to use Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 to complement Office Project Server 2007. This expands the value of the solution beyond operational management into strategic decisions on alignment of investments with business objectives.