PMFORUM Breaking News

More than 1,500 business managers, technology professionals and developers gathered in Seattle this week for the sold out Microsoft Office Project and Visio conferences, where Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer detailed advances in the upcoming releases of Microsoft Office Project and Microsoft Office Visio. In addition, Ballmer announced the completion of the acquisition of software and intellectual property assets from UMT, a leading project and portfolio management and consulting firm. The acquisition will provide Microsoft with new technology and talent that will complement and expand upon the existing Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution.

"We’re excited because acquiring UMT will help us meet customers' needs for deep portfolio management capabilities," said Ballmer. "By combining our software and expertise, we’ll also create a new range of solution development opportunities for customers and partners."

According to Microsoft, the next release of Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management Solution, code-named Microsoft Office Project "12," has been designed as a critical business application to help companies and business users deliver business results more quickly with an end-to-end, integrated enterprise project and portfolio management solution. Project "12" also delivers new innovations and greater benefits in the areas of visibility and insight, organizational adoption, enterprise readiness and extensibility.

Examples of these new advances include these:

• Better visibility and insight. Server-side capabilities in Project "12" will draw on the newly acquired UMT technologies to enable organizations to gain greater business visibility and insight into all their work, helping them make key decisions about which projects and initiatives to fund. One example of this is UMT’s ability to federate data across the enterprise to get a holistic, top-down view of work in an organization.
• Easy adoption. Project "12" will help make it even easier for business users to manage projects using Microsoft Project. With Project "12," project managers will be able to easily track project changes by having them visually displayed as projects are updated. In addition, the Project Server-based Web application, Project Web Access (PWA), will provide all Project team participants with a simple Web interface to perform critical business tasks such as project proposals, top-down budgeting, resource management, time-tracking and task status updating.
• Enterprise readiness. Project "12" will deliver significant advancements in performance and scalability. Project "12" benefits from an improved architecture. Many new features will improve performance, such as local cache tools, which enable users to work offline and then resyncs automatically when they’re back online. Project "12" will also incorporate new features such as those for deliverables, which makes it easier for managers to handle the complexity of master projects and dependencies across multiple projects.
• Extensibility. Project Web Access "12" has been built completely on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and many functions will use the .NET Platform 2.0. This platform helps enable companies to take advantage of their existing Microsoft investments. The new API facilitates integration with line-of-business applications and development of custom applications. Furthermore, business users can easily build in business process flows using Project’s new Event Services with the Windows Workflow Foundation.

Project "12" is expected to be available as part of the product releases for Microsoft Office "12," the code name for the next version of Office, in the second half of 2006.