What’s New in Project Server 2010
Microsoft Project Server 2010 brings together the business collaboration platform services of Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2010 with structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Project Server 2010 unifies project and portfolio management to help organizations align resources and investments with business priorities, gain control across all types of work, and visualize performance through powerful dashboards.
Unified Project & Portfolio Management (PPM)
In Project 2010, the best-of-breed portfolio management techniques of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 are included in Project Server 2010, providing a single server with end-to-end project and portfolio management (PPM) capabilities.
- Familiar SharePoint user interface throughout the solution.
- Common data store eliminating the need for the Project Server Gateway.
- Intuitive and simplified administration.
- Localized portfolio selection capabilities.
- Comprehensive Application Programming Interface (API) including both project and portfolio capabilities.
Built on SharePoint Server 2010
Project Server 2010 is built on top of SharePoint Server 2010, bringing together the powerful business collaboration platform services and structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Gain additional value from the Microsoft platform.
- Take advantage of the Business Intelligence platform to easily create reports and powerful dashboards.
- Control document review and approval through workflow.
- Enterprise search makes it easy to find people and effectively mine project data (resources, tasks, documents etc.).
- Connect teams and enhance communication with wikis, blogs, discussion forums and My Sites.
Project Initiation & Business Case Development
Project Server 2010 provides a new demand management module to capture all work from simple tasks to complex projects and programs.
- Develop and deploy effective governance workflows to manage project investments throughout their lifecycle and drive accountability and control.
- Define Enterprise Project Types for all requests and associate with workflow, a project plan and a custom workspace template.
- Standardize data collection through configurable business case forms. Capture project information, cost estimates, resource estimates, strategic alignment assessments and more.
- Display relevant Enterprise Project Types for each line of business using departmental fields.
Portfolio Selection
Project Server 2010 helps organizations select project portfolios that align with their business strategy by providing techniques to prioritize competing requests, run optimization scenarios under varying budgetary constraints and maximize resource utilization across the planning horizon.
Business Strategy Prioritization
- Objectively prioritize business drivers and drive consensus across the executive team.
- Intuitive and visual interface for completing the business driver prioritization assessment.
Enhanced Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI)
Experience the strength and depth of Microsoft Business Intelligence platform. Gain transparency and control with Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio Services, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 andSQL Reporting Services.
- Get started quickly with predefined best practice and localized report templates in the new Business Intelligence Center.
- Intuitively customize reports in a familiar Excel editor and publish through Excel Services.
- Simply create powerful audience-based dashboards to effectively monitor portfolio performance.
- Satisfy line of business reporting requirements with Departmental Cubes. Allow decision makers to focus on their data, eliminate unnecessary clutter and ensure faster cube build times.
Simplified Administration
- Project Permissions – Empower project managers to control who can view or edit their projects with Project Permissions.
- User Delegation – Enhanced delegation enables users to easily specify colleagues to act as their delegate when on vacation, without assistance from the administrator.
- Departmental Fields – Provide a level of autonomy while maintaining enterprise standardization and control. With Departmental Fields administrators can associate Enterprise Project Types, Resources and Custom Fields to specific departments, eliminating unnecessary clutter and allowing departments to focus on their data.
- Centralized Administration – One stop administration console for managing both project and portfolio management capabilities.
- Administer Reporting Cubes – Enhanced administration interface for displaying the status and managing available cubes. Quickly take action and intuitively add, edit, delete, copy and refresh cubes.
Extend Interoperability
Integration with related Microsoft technologies provides a familiar and connected work management platform. Empower teams to work in their preferred productivity tools and provide status updates toproject stakeholders with minimal effort and administrative overhead.
- Microsoft® Exchange Server – Conveniently receive and update your project tasks in Outlook or Outlook Web App.
- Microsoft® Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Seamlessly connect the worlds of application development and project and portfolio management.
- SharePoint Server Sync – Effortlessly improve productivity with bidirectional status updates between Project Professional 2010 and SharePoint.
Top 10 Benefits
Microsoft Project Server 2010 is built on Microsoft SharePoint® Server 2010, and brings together powerful business collaboration platform services with structured execution capabilities to provide flexible work management solutions. Project Server 2010 unifies project and portfolio management to help organizations align resources and investments with strategic priorities, gain control across all types of work, and visualize performance by using powerful dashboards.
1. Unified project and portfolio management.
The best-in-class portfolio management techniques available in Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 are incorporated into Project Server 2010, providing a single server with an intuitive user interface that offers the right tools to support the entire project life cycle. By combining top-down portfolio management techniques with bottom-up project management capabilities, Project Server 2010 helps organizations identify and select optimal portfolios, and successfully deliver the projects to realize results.
2. Drive accountability and control with governance workflow.
Project Server 2010 workflow capabilities help organizations define the right governance processes to effectively control all types of work—project and operational—throughout the work life cycle. Establishing checkpoints within the process and identifying individuals with the appropriate approval authority helps drive accountability, increases awareness, and provides an auditable record of all investment decisions. The new Proposal Status Page helps the Project Management Office (PMO) effectively communicate the governance processes and educate employees to drive adoption, satisfaction, and compliance.
3. Standardize and streamline project initiation.
Project Server 2010 provides a one-stop-shopping demand management portal to help organizations streamline and standardize the initiation process for all types of work. Centralizing project and operational activities in a central system provides organizations with visibility across all requests and in-flight initiatives, so it is easy to eliminate duplicate requests and quickly assess the impact on available resources. The flexibility of Project Server 2010 helps the PMO provide departments with a level of autonomy, while standardizing the collection of data to facilitate enterprise reporting.
4. Select the right portfolios that align with strategy.
Gone are the days when projects are funded on a first-come, first-served basis. ProjectServer 2010 includes best-practice portfolio selection techniques that provide ahandshake between value optimization Âthat is, alignment with strategy Âand resourceutilization, to help organizations adopt a more rational rather than emotional approachto investment selection. The new portfolio management and analytical capabilities helpexecutives do more with less and objectively demonstrate the investment alignmentwith strategic priorities.
- Effectively prioritize and communicate business strategy.
Project Server 2010 helps executives break down their strategy into actionable, measurable, and discrete business drivers. The intuitive pairwise assessment helps to ensure that organizations objectively prioritize business drivers, drive executive consensus, and derive a relative score that is used to measure the strategic contribution of competing requests. Consolidating and prioritizing business drivers within Project Server 2010 helps to communicate the strategy in actionable terms, and provide a blueprint that can be understood and implemented by departmental managers.
- Run what-if analyses under varying constraints.
Project Server 2010 helps organizations prioritize and assess projects from multiple dimensions strategic value, financial value, risk Âto provide objective, apples-to-apples comparisons. The intuitive Cost Constraint Analysis view helps analysts quickly model varying budget constraints and use a sophisticated optimization algorithm to recommend the project portfolio that best aligns with the business strategy. The Efficient Frontier, Strategic Alignment, and Compare Scenario views provide powerful insights that help executives identify tradeoffs, and evaluate and refine portfolio selection.
- Proactively reschedule projects to maximize resource utilization.
The new capacity planning capability in Project Server 2010 helps analysts proactively assess the impact of proposed portfolio on the resource pool, and model scenarios to enhance utilization across the planning horizon. The powerful Resource Constraint Analysis view provides a holistic portal to help organizations visualize resource shortfalls and underutilization, adjust project start dates to better utilize available employees, and model headcount decisions to identify optimal hiring strategies.
5. Easily build Web-based project schedules.
Project Server 2010 empowers a mobile workforce by bringing the power of Microsoft Project Professional 2010 to the browser with Web-based project scheduling. Project managers can now take advantage of powerful diagnostic capabilities, such as Change Highlighting and Multi-Level Undo without first opening Project Professional 2010. Web-based scheduling provides occasional and certified project managers with the flexibility to quickly build simple and complex schedules online, and conveniently edit the plan from any location over the Internet.
6. Intuitively submit time and task updates.
Project Server 2010 provides organizations with the flexibility they need to centralize time capture, streamline processes, automate task management, and increase the accuracy of project forecasting. Time reporting capabilities have been further enhanced in Project Server 2010 to provide a new Single Entry Mode to unify time and task status updates. The Web-based user interface for timesheet entry and task management has been standardized to speed learning and enhance user experience. Project Server 2010 connects with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to ensure that team members can conveniently receive and update their project tasks in Microsoft Outlook® 2010 and Outlook Web App.
7. Gain visibility and control through reports and dashboards.
Project Server 2010 provides a powerful reporting infrastructure coupled with flexible Business Intelligence tools to help ensure that organizations proactively gain visibility across their project portfolios, that they can react quickly, and can generate custom reports. Project Server 2010 uses the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, including Excel® Services, PerformancePoint® Services, Visio® Services, PowerPivot for Excel, SQL Reporting Services, and more, to provide organizations with a comprehensive solution that will grow with their reporting needs. The solution provides nontechnical resources with familiar tools to easily create reports and configure powerful audience-based dashboards, while providing technical resources with more sophisticated capabilities to create complex views.
8. Simplified administration and flexibility.
Project Server 2010 is extremely flexible and can be quickly configured to meet an organizationÂs unique requirements and business processes. Project Server 2010 simplifies administration through an improved console that consolidates both project and portfolio management capabilities. New features including User Delegation and Project Permissions reduce the burden on the administrator by empowering user action. Project Server 2010 helps to ensure that PMOs and administrators can spend less time managing the system and focus more on project and portfolio delivery and performance.
9. Gain additional value from the Microsoft platform.
Project Server 2010 connects with related Microsoft technologies, such as SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Office 2010, and Exchange Server 2010, to provide a powerful and familiar work management platform. This helps to ensure that team members can choose their preferred productivity tools to easily receive tasks and provide status updates to project stakeholders with minimal effort and administrative overhead. This flexibility helps drive productivity and helps to ensure that project managers and PMOs can effectively gather the required data to drive enterprise reporting and resource management.
10. Extensible and programmable platform.
Project Server 2010 provides an open, extensible, and programmable platform to help ensure that organizations can easily develop custom solutions and effectively integrate with line-of business systems. Because Project Server 2010 is built on SharePoint Server 2010, developers can take advantage of a consistent and robust platform to rapidly build and deploy solutions using familiar tools and services, including Windows Communication Foundation, Business Connectivity Services, Microsoft Visual Studio® 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010.
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