Project Online: In the cloud with Office 365!
Is it challenging to get an up-to-date view of all the projects in your team? Do you want to make sure everyone is focused on the right priorities? Do you manage a large portfolio of projects and want to roll out a structured governance process? Are you a Project Manager who always wants to use the latest version of Project Professional?
As announced on Monday (The New Microsoft Project), Project Online has been designed for you! The service provides the following key capabilities:
· The New SharePoint – Project Online is fully integrated with the New SharePoint, and offers all its benefits, including a clean user experience, pervasive social networking, simple task management capabilities on any team site and a personal view of all your SharePoint and Outlook tasks in one place.
· Project Web App (PWA) – Project Online includes PWA, a web-based Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution that helps you select the right projects that align to your business goals, manage your team’s workload, track time spent on projects and get insights through powerful business intelligence tools.
· Project Pro for Office 365 – Project Online offers anytime, anywhere access to Project Professional via application streaming.
Best of all, Project Online is an integral part of the Office 365 family of services, providing the same class of reliability, scalability and availability. We are very excited to introduce this new service, read on for the top 10 benefits:
| 1. Online PPM: All the rich PPM capabilities including Portfolio Management, Resource Management, Time Tracking and Business Intelligence are available in the cloud, in a secure and scalable multi-tenant environment, with enterprise-grade reliability.2. Get started quickly: Built on SharePoint Online and designed to work with Office 365, Project Online offers a familiar experience that improves participation and helps people get more done. An intuitive interface along with visual cues helps you begin (or hone) PPM capabilities. | |
| 3. Take action: Stay up-to-date in more places and on more devices. You can effortlessly pick up from wherever you leave off with Project Online.4. Improve governance and control: Project Online enables you to define and select optimal project portfolios that align with your business strategy. Effectively evaluate ideas or measure the strategic contribution of competing requests to determine alignment and streamline project initiation. You can easily create workflows with Visio in SharePoint Designer to model proposal approval processes. |  Project Workflow Status |
| 5. Effectively manage resources: See what your teams are doing—even when they’re managing everyday work or ad hoc projects in SharePoint Online. Now you can capture all demand, accurately measure utilization and manage allocation to make objective decisions that align with your strategy.6. Strengthen everyday collaboration: Share documents, follow people and sites, or keep track of things people are working on. You can bind together the social experiences of SharePoint Online and Project Online to facilitate discussion and information sharing to help people get work done. |  Resource Management |
| 7. Seamlessly communicate: Share urgent schedule changes or remedy potential concerns with real-time communications plus instant messaging that’s enabled right within your project. And, in the project site, you can illustrate dates and deliverables on a visual timeline to keep everyone informed and organized at-a-glance.8. Make data-driven decisions: In PWA, you can see summary dashboards, rich reports, project timelines or entire project plans, to help you manage your projects or a group of programs. Self-service access enables people to quickly mine and aggregate data on many dimensions—to understand risk and align long-term planning with short-term execution needs. |  Portfolio Analysis |
| 9. Improve IT management: Project Online simplifies IT management, integrating the administration experience with SharePoint Online so you can easily get set up, add resources, and adjust permissions. And because Project Online separates IT and business settings, your Project Management Office (PMO) or business sponsor are empowered to manage business-specific PPM settings independently.10. Quickly innovate: Quickly act on new challenges or respond to big opportunities. Shave time off discreet processes. With Project Online, you can choose apps from the SharePoint Store to meet the unique needs of your business. |  Project Online Apps |