Product: Project 2000
Company: Microsoft
Website: http://www.microsoft.com
Estimated Street Price: $499.00
Review By: Julien JAY

Introduction

Microsoft has released a few months after its new Office 2000 software suite, a new version of its brand new project management software. This new version was long awaited since the previous one was released in 1998. When Microsoft Corp. first introduced in 1990 Microsoft Project 1.0 for Windows, the software was one of the first of its race. Since then this kind of project management software has grown relatively fast and is now used by almost every person responsible who is in charge of a project in the computers and services business sectors. Microsoft Project 2000 is the sixth release of Project and is aimed to conquer even more users than the already existing 3 million. The basis of Microsoft Project 2000 is to provide workers management software that is easy to use and flexible to plan and track the evolution of their collaborative projects.

Microsoft Project 2000 Features:


• Personal Gantt Chart: This renders Gantt views like those in Microsoft Project to outline each team member’s own tasks across multiple projects.
• New Task: Team members can create tasks; the project manager can approve those new tasks before adding them to the project plan.
• Task Delegation: Once assigned by the project manger, tasks may be delegated from leads to team members or from peer to peer. Delegation can be disabled.
• Show Microsoft Outlook® Tasks: Team members can show entries from their task list in the Outlook messaging and collaboration client so they can see all their project and nonproject tasks in a single location.
• View Nonworking Time: Team members can report nonworking time to the project manager or can report nonproject time, such as vacation or sick leave.
• Auto-Accept Rules: Managers can reduce time spent in administrative activities by establishing rules to automatically accept actual hours, percent complete or any information in a custom field.
• Status Reports: Users can create custom report formats and request and receive team member status updates that Microsoft Project Central automatically rolls into a group report.
• Administration Module: This provides project administrators with more control over definitions of nonproject time, views, formatting styles and security to ensure consistency in project-management approaches and organization structure.
• Views: Senior executives, managers and team members can access different views of projects, such as View Your Portfolio, View Your Project and View Assignments.
• Offline Capabilities: Team members can take their timesheets and status reports offline and continue working on them from wherever they are.
• Grouping: Users can quickly categorize and view rolled-up task and resource information in any way they need.
• Outline Codes: Users can define their own outline codes instead of having to tie them to the outline structure of their project. They can use their custom outline codes to create alternate hierarchical structures for tasks or resources (e.g. with outline codes based on cost or job codes).
• Graphical Indicators: Users can associate graphical indicators with the data in a custom field, so a particular image can be displayed in place of the actual data to easily spot potential problems.
• Task Calendars: Task-specific calendars let users create schedules that affect only selected tasks.
• Deadline Dates: Users can remind the team of deadlines and alert them visually if deadlines cannot be met.
• Custom Fields: Value Lists Users can employ user-defined pick-lists to restrict the values that can be entered into a custom field and simplify data entry with just a mouse click.
• Custom Fields: Formulas Users can add custom formulas for arithmetic calculations, conditional testing and functions to be applied to custom field data.
• OLE DB: With OLE DB (read only), other applications can access Microsoft Project data, making it much easier to integrate project data across the enterprise.
• Estimated Durations: Users can indicate that the duration of a given task is tentative by simply entering the duration followed by a “?” and return to the task at a later time to enter a confirmed duration.
• Clear Baseline: This clears the baseline or interim plan data for selected tasks or an entire project.
• Templates: Microsoft Project Templates are easy to create and access.
• Variable Row Height: Users can drag the row line between tasks to set individual rows to differing row heights.
• In-Cell Editing: Users can view the context of a task while editing it.
• Windows Terminal Server Support Microsoft Project can run on Terminal Server.
• Pluggable Language User Interface A single executable worldwide makes deployment easy in multinational companies.
• Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) Microsoft Project Object Model continues to provide even more ways to customize.
• And much more.