Project 2010 to tighten integration

Stephen Withers
Monday, 22 March 2010 13:04

Business IT - Technology

The Microsoft Project 2010 family - due for release next quarter - will include improved collaboration features, increased integration with other Microsoft products, and user interface improvements.

Project management software is a $US2.8 billion category, and Microsoft claims to be the leader with around 20 million users.

Project portfolio management (choosing between possible projects) has become more important to organisations due at least in part to shrinking budgets, and Microsoft Project 2010 will unify project management and project portfolio management, Microsoft's director of Project, Seth Patton, told iTWire.

Microsoft first released Project Server around a decade ago (to take care of the collaborative side of project management), and Project Portfolio Server arrived in 2007 following an acquisition.

With the 2010 release, these two components will be combined as Project Server 2010, with a single interface, repository and infrastructure (built on SharePoint).

Among the features will be the ability to create dashboards to show project status at a glance, to produce reports in Excel, and to create business rules and workflows for projects.

There's more on Project Server 2010, Project 2010 and Project 2010 Professional on page 2.