Project Pro 2002 Upgrade

Keeping track of multiple projects across a large company is a daunting task when projects are competing for resources and money. Project Professional lets you centralise specific and generic resources in the company address book and monitor them across projects. You can start by assigning generic resources as placeholders when you plan a project and then automatically allocate whichever real resources are available, in the right place and have the right skills with the Resource Substitution Wizard. You can still allocate specific resources and people yourself and you can choose whether to share resources or not.

Even more than with Project Standard, the collaborative tools rely on running Project Server; that also lets you see resources, get an overview of multiple projects and model what-if scenarios. You can also create and share documents, templates and custom fields for resources and tasks to make sure everyone is working the same way. Enterprise templates let you make sure projects follow company procedures and stick to company calendars and working hours. Put generic resources in the templates and the Team Builder tools will automatically find the people you need to work on them.

There are many extra tools in Project Professional designed for working with Project Server to put in the specific details that your company needs to track in projects; building and sharing the enterprise templates, managing resources and sharing resources and creating custom details of skills and options. If you only need the basic project management tools check out Project Standard but if you want to manage people, resources and systems across departments or an entire company, Project Professional lets you customise it to match the way you want to work.--Mary Branscombe

Microsoft Project Server centrally stores the project and resource information published from Microsoft Project Professional. Microsoft Project Server extends this information to project teams through its Web portal, called Microsoft Project Web Access. You can then use Web Access's Resource Centre to view, group, and edit resource information and even evaluate resource utilization and availability across multiple projects.

Note: To achieve the full benefit of the enterprise resource and portfolio management features, Microsoft Project Professional must be used with Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project Server Client Access License(s) (CALs).