A new vision for modern work management with Microsoft Project

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Today, I’m pleased to announce a new vision for Microsoft Project and three new services designed to help people work together more efficiently.

Over the last few years, the basic organizing concept for work—the project—has changed significantly. Once a well-defined set of tasks, people, and milestones, today’s projects take on many shapes and sizes. They can be formal or ad hoc. They can last a few hours or go on for years. They can be assigned to a small group or cut across many large organizations.

As a result, whether we realize it or not, we have all become project managers. And to stay on top of the ever-shifting requirements of our day-to-day jobs, we need tools that are simple enough for anyone to use, flexible enough to support any project type, powerful enough to handle initiatives of any size, and transparent enough to provide visibility across the organization.

Modern work management

Introducing modern work management with Microsoft Project. It all starts with Home, a new service that allows you to see and manage all your projects in one place. From Home, you can easily create projects using the new project management service. Versatile by design, this new service is designed to support any role, skill level, or project type. These new Project services are born in the cloud, so teams can always access the same data—no matter where they are or what device they’re using. And they include a comprehensive set of capabilities, including resource and financial management and time and expense tracking. Future releases will allow customers to connect the full power of the Project desktop app to the service.

Microsoft Project

Streamline project, resource, and portfolio management with Microsoft Project to help you keep track of projects successfully.

Work is happening across your organization all the time, and it can be hard to keep track of the details. The new Roadmap service will give you a cross-functional, big picture view of all the work in process. With Roadmap, it doesn’t matter whether your teams are using Microsoft Project or Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS). You can create timeline views of multiple projects—complete with key dates and milestones—so that all the work is visible. And in future releases, we’ll add support for Planner and third-party services like Jira, making Project your one-stop-shop for managing work across the organization. Roadmap is the first capability of Portfolio, a set of program and portfolio management services designed to be simple, visual, and intuitive.

The power of the Microsoft platform

We’ve built these new Project services to take advantage of the strengths of the broader Microsoft platform. In fact, all three new services are built on the Microsoft Common Data Service for Apps platform. This solid foundation provides a long list of benefits, including access to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow for custom business solutions and integration with Power BI for advanced analytics and reporting.

What’s next?

These new services will be introduced in a series of releases. Home is generally available today, the first release of Roadmap will be available early next year, and the first release of the new project management service will be available in the first half of next year. All three services will be packaged as a part of the Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions, so current subscribers can take advantage of the new capabilities at no additional cost. And while these new services will become our primary project management services over time, customers who are already using Project Online can continue to do so with confidence. We are committed to your success no matter what Project service you choose to use.

We’re very excited to see what individuals, teams, and organizations will achieve with these new services in Microsoft Project! If you have questions or want to learn how to get more out of your investment in Project, you can find more details in this Tech Community blog, or contact your Microsoft representative.