Microsoft 's desktop productivity tool, Microsoft Project, will
make its debut next month as a fully-fledged corporate project and
resource management product suite, the company announced at the
NetWorld+Interop show in Las Vegas.
The move is another step in Microsoft's plan to build a family of
enterprise resource management (ERP) products and the announcement
coincided with Microsoft's bid for Navision, the European
mid-market ERP vendor.
The new Project family of products will have a similar look and
feel to Microsoft's Office XP product suite. But more importantly
it incorporates new, centralised resource allocation and monitoring
functions designed to allow management of a whole portfolio of
projects, according to product manager Charles Zaragoza.
Project now also incorporates XML and Simple Object Application
Protocol (Soap) functions, which bring the project-management
application into Microsoft's .net plan for the integration of
products and applications over the Internet.
"Project has grown up and is ready for the enterprise," said
Zaragoza.
The new product family will include: Microsoft Project Standard
2002, with an estimated retail price of $599 (£410); Project
Professional 2002, priced at $999 (£683); and Microsoft Project
Server 2002, priced at $1,499 (£1,026) including five Microsoft
Project Server client access licences. Additional licences will be
priced at $179 (£122) each.
With the release of Project Professional and Project Server,
however, Microsoft is making a major step toward offering corporate
managers a way to bring project and personnel data into a central
repository, and collaborate on allocating resources across diverse
projects.
A variety of project managers, each using Project, can store data
on Project Server, which works with Microsoft SQL Server (purchased
separately) and taps SQL (Structured Query Language) analysis and
reporting functions, according to Zaragoza. Executives, equipped
with Project Server client access licences, (as opposed to the
actual application) use a Web browser to monitor data in the
Project Server.
Executives, via Web access, can then use the new Portfolio Analyzer
to set up user-defined criteria, and check on the status of various
projects. Using modelling functions, executives can, for example,
do "what-if" analysis if they see that a project is falling behind
schedule and may have to draw on resources from other project
teams.
Data can be imported - via XML functions for example - from legacy
human-resources applications, and used to build project teams,
Zaragoza said. Automated tools allow project managers to build
teams based on available personnel and resources.
The new Project suite can be seen as a key to Microsoft's plans to
build up a family of enterprise resource management (ERP) products,
according to Dennis Byron, vice-president of the Enterprise
Applications Research Department at market-research company
IDC.
"Microsoft is increasingly competing with the ERP players. This
[new Project] is just another logical rounding out of the product
line, it helps get them into the professional services automation
market as well, since you can use it to do asset maintenance across
the enterprise," he said.
Microsoft will increasingly offer an integrated suite of business
resource planning tools, as it develops software acquired last year
with the purchase of business application vendor Great Plains
Software and from the forthcoming acquisition of Navision.