Microsoft® Office Project 2003
Deepening our Enterprise Project Management Capabilities
Microsoft® Office Project 2003 provides a family of products to support your work and people management needs, whether you manage projects independently or manage a project portfolio across a team, department, or organization. An integral part of the Microsoft Office System, the line of products includes Project Standard 2003, Project Professional 2003, Project Server 2003, and Project Web Access.
Project Standard 2003 is the new version of Microsoft's core project management program, designed to be used by project managers who need a desktop tool to manage their projects independently. Project Standard 2003 is designed to improve your ability to organize work and communicate effectively and succinctly through familiar, easy-to-use tools. Some of the enhancements to Project Standard 2003 include a wizard to help you easily configure one-page printouts of project schedules and a wizard to assist you in exporting and presenting project information more effectively through other Microsoft Office System programs, like Visio and PowerPoint.
Project Professional 2003, Project Server 2003, and Project Web Access are designed to work together to make up the Microsoft solution for Enterprise Project Management (EPM). This solution enables organizations to align business initiatives, projects, and resources for better business results. By using the flexible reporting and analysis capabilities in the EPM solution, organizations have actionable information to help optimize resources, prioritize work, and align projects as a portfolio with overall business objectives.
Project Server 2003 is the platform that supports the portfolio management, resource management and collaboration capabilities in our EPM solution. With Project Server, you can store project and resource information centrally for consistency and standardization across an organization. With this new release, Project Server 2003 is integrated with Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services for document management capabilities (now including versioning and check-in/check-out); risk tracking; and other collaboration tools that enable team members to work together effectively. Users connect to Project Server through Project Professional and Project Web Access to save, retrieve, and interact with Project Server data.
Project Professional 2003 is the Microsoft desktop enterprise project management program that is used with Project Server2003 and Project Web Access, to make up the Microsoft solution for Enterprise Project Management. Project Professional offers all the core tools found in Project Standard, plus used together with Project Server, it also provides powerful enterprise project management capabilities such as portfolio management and modeling, skill-based resource management, and project collaboration. With Project Professional 2003, project managers will be able to book resources on a project as either “proposed” or “reserved”, so organizations can plan ahead by tracking potential resource assignments for projects that are still in the proposal phase.
Project Web Access is the Web portal that enables people to connect to the project and resource information in Project Server. Team members, executives, and resource managers--in other words, anyone who needs access to Project Server information but does not require the scheduling capabilities of Project Professional--can use Project Web Access through a Web browser to view, update, and analyze information. Some of the new and improved capabilities in Project Web Access include better web-based time reporting and Outlook Calendar integration.
The architecture of the Microsoft solution for EPM has been improved so you can more easily administer setup and partitioning and also customize the solution through extensive API connectors.
“With the 2003 version of the Project family of products we're deepening our enterprise project management capabilities,” said Chris Capossela, General Manager of the Project Business Unit at Microsoft Corporation. “With Microsoft Project 2002 we took our first major step into the enterprise by delivering Project Server to the marketplace. With our upcoming release we're improving our family of project management products for every core user type: resource managers, project managers, executives, team members, IT administrators and developers. At the heart of these improvements is our commitment to building on top of key technologies in the upcoming Microsoft Office System. Windows SharePoint Services and Outlook 2003 integration are two important examples that will make project collaboration much simpler and more natural and thereby increase team member participation in project-based work.”