Applies to
Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003

If you use Project Professional 2003 and you want to share project information with your project team and facilitate collaboration between team members, check out Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003.

What is Project Server and how is it used?

How does Project Server enable team collaboration?

What are the required components for using Project Server?

How is information displayed in Project Web Access?

How can I track project progress using Project Server?

What enterprise features does Project Server enable?

How can I use Project Server for status reporting?

How can I manage documents or track issues and risks with Project Server?

Does Project Server work with Outlook?

What is Project Server and how is it used?

Project Server is a companion program to Project Professional. It enables online collaboration between project managers, team members, and stakeholders (stakeholders: Individuals and organizations that are actively involved in the project or whose interests may be affected by the project.). It also allows your organization to share standards across projects, help secure projects with check in and check out capability, view resource availability and other resource information across projects, and manage and report on portfolios of projects.

Project Server works with Project Web Access, the Web-based user interface that is used to access Project Server information. Together with Project, they offer an effective solution for team collaboration. They provide great flexibility and numerous benefits for communicating efficiently with team members, other project managers, and stakeholders.

From Project, project managers can connect to Project Server to:

• Assign tasks to team members and keep track of work that's completed so they can automatically or manually accept task updates from team members and incorporate the updated information into their project.
• Request and receive status reports in the format they want and consolidate individual status reports into one project status report that they can then present to stakeholders.
• Perform what-if analysis to compare costs, schedules, and resource allocation after they've created different versions of their project. They can also see the effect of schedule changes on resource availability, resource allocation, and costs.
• View resource availability across their organization and build their team so they can also assign generic resources to tasks, find and substitute resources based on their skills, and build teams from a common list of enterprise resources.

Team members can access information on Project Server by using Project Web Access to:

• Review and update their task assignments so they can also respond to the project manager about their assignments, and send updates about completed work at regular intervals. They can even create new tasks and send them to the project manager for approval and incorporation into the project plan. If necessary, and with the right permissions, they can delegate tasks to other team members.
• View their tasks in a Gantt Chart format for a graphic representation of the duration of tasks and their relationships to other tasks. To focus on specific details, tasks in this view can be grouped, sorted, and filtered. Depending on the permissions given to them by the Project Server administrator (administrator: Sets up and manages user accounts, assigns permissions, and helps users with network or server access issues. This person can also manage and customize various elements in Project Professional and in Project Server.), team members can also view the latest information for the entire project, not just their assigned tasks.
• Integrate with Microsoft Outlook to view and update their project tasks in the Outlook calendar.

Stakeholders, such as other project managers or executives, can also access information on Project Server by using Project Web Access to:

• Review project, task, and resource information so they can get a glimpse of how projects are progressing, individually, or across the organization.

How does Project Server enable team collaboration?

As a project manager, you can easily communicate project information to your team members through Project Server. You do your scheduling and tracking work within Project, as usual. When you're ready to update the project information for team members and stakeholders, you simply publish it to Project Server. The information is then stored on the server, so that team members and stakeholders can see the latest data about the project, using Project Web Access.

Your team members, who presumably don't have Project installed on their computer, can use a Web browser to access Project Web Access pages and see the project information stored in Project Server, such as their task assignments. They can respond to you about those assignments and send you progress updates and status reports from Project Web Access as they work on them.

In return, you can respond to progress updates directly from Project, where you can display the Project Web Access Updates page to review and approve changes made by your team members before you incorporate them into your project plan.

Information from Project Web Access pages is displayed in Project without the surrounding Project Web Access functionality, and you can only review information that's related to your current project. Task and resource information about other projects are not shown in Project but may be viewable in Project Web Access. To see additional information, you can access Project Web Access by using a Web browser.

As mentioned earlier, team members and stakeholders can use Project Web Access to review and work with project information. The information they can see and which projects they can access are controlled by security settings.

What are the required components for using Project Server?

To use Project Server for your organization's team collaboration, installation of the following programs is required:

• Project Professional   Project Professional must be installed on the project manager's computer.
• Project Server   Project Server must be installed on a server computer with Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 or later and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack 3 or later already installed.

  After Project Server is installed, a Project Server administrator can provide you with the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so you can connect to it.

  Note  To have complete access to Project Server, its URL should be made a trusted site in Internet Explorer.

• Project Web Access   Each team member must have a copy of Project Web Access, which is licensed separately. For details about licensing for Project Web Access, see the Microsoft end-user license agreement for the product.
• Browser   A browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 3 or later (Internet Explorer 5.5 or later is recommended), is needed to display project information in Project Web Access.
• Internet access   Internet functionality requires dial-up or broadband Internet access, provided separately.
• E-mail system  E-mail features such as e-mail notification require a Windows-compatible network and a MAPI-compliant e-mail system.

How is information displayed in Project Web Access?

Project Web Access organizes information into different pages, such as the Projects page or the Tasks page. On each page, information is displayed in Project Web Access views. Much like views in Project, these views include a variety of fields and filters and are formatted to focus on specific areas of the project.

A Project Server administrator defines and controls the pages and views and assigns user permissions so that team members, executives, and stakeholders can see the information they need. Depending on the assigned permissions, users may see some or all of the following pages and information in Project Web Access:

• Home page  This page is your hub for activity in Project Web Access. After you log on, the Home page lists outstanding tasks, status reports, and other important project information that involves you.
• Tasks page  This page displays a Gantt Chart or timesheet (timesheet: In Project Web Access, the timesheet is a page where resources can record their progress on tasks and send updates to the project manager.) view with task assignments for each individual team member.
• Projects page  This page displays additional task, resource, and assignment information about the current project or a portfolio of projects across an organization.
• Resources page  This page displays resource information, such as cost and schedule, for a specific project or for projects across the organization.
• Status Reports page  This page displays status report information, and you can use it to to request, collect, consolidate, and create reminder alerts for text-based status reports.
• Updates page  This page displays updates to project tasks and to resource working times, and you can use it to update your project plans with the latest information.
• Risks page  This page displays information about project-related risks and their status. Risk information is stored in a Windows SharePoint Services document library.
• Issues page  This page displays project-related problems and resolutions that are stored in a Windows SharePoint Services document library.
• Documents page  This page displays project-related documents stored in a Windows SharePoint Services from Microsoft document library.
• Admin page  This page is used to set defaults and define users and security for Project Web Access and to set defaults for some Project and Project Server features.

How can I track project progress using Project Server?

After you and your team members are set up to use Project Server to exchange information between Project and Project Web Access, keeping track of progress on tasks becomes an easy, two-way process.

• From Project, you communicate task assignments to your team members. When you publish task assignments to Project Server, team members can use the timesheet on the Tasks page of Project Web Access to review those assignments, change or update their task information, and enter actuals as they complete work on their tasks.
• From Project Web Access, team members communicate task updates and changes back to you. When team members send you updated task information, you can incorporate the progress or changes on tasks in Project. Task updates can be made at any time, but you can request that they be sent to you at regular intervals.

 The project manager can communicate task information directly from Project, as well as access Project Server 2003 by using Project Web Access to control how project information is viewed and updated by the team members.

 Team members use Project Web Access to view and update their task assignments as work on them progresses, and to communicate this information to Project Server.

 Information is synchronized between Project and Project Server upon the project manager's approval.

After incorporating changes into your project, you can verify their effect on the project and make the necessary adjustments. Finally, you may want to publish the current project schedule to Project Server so that, depending on their permissions, your team members can review it in Project Web Access.

What enterprise features does Project Server enable?

When you configure Project Server to be enterprise-enabled, you have access to all of the enterprise features of Project Professional. You can do the following:

• Work offline or online   You can either work offline, on locally-saved Project files, or online, where files are checked in and checked out from Project Server. When you work online, all the data in your project plan is saved to Project Server.
• Use an enterprise resource pool   Project Server is the repository for your enterprise resource pool, so all of the project-related information about resources and the information about all of your organization's projects is accessible throughout your organization, subject to security settings.
• View a portfolio of projects   Because all project data is stored in Project Server, Project Web Access users with appropriate permissions can see a portfolio of projects from across the organization in the Project center.
• Build your team   Project managers can see information about enterprise resources, check their availability across projects, and use the Build Team from Enterprise and Resource Substitution features to find resources that meet their project's requirements.
• Perform analysis   Users with appropriate permissions can do what-if analysis; for instance, modeling ways to better balance resources between projects. They can also analyze project performance, costs, resource usage, and so on for a portfolio of projects, to see how the organization, as a whole, is doing.

How can I use Project Server for status reporting?

With Project Server, you can design status reports, which are forms with text boxes that team members can fill out in Project Web Access to describe the status of their work. Unlike task updates, status reports do not contain numerical information about the project and cannot be used to update it. Status reports can be used to provide detailed information about accomplishments, goals, issues, and other factors that affect the team member's work. You can distribute status reports to other people in your organization or post them in a central location where others can see them. You can also consolidate individual reports from your team members into one larger status report for your whole team.

For effective status reporting, you can:

• Define content sections of status reports.
• Specify how often team members should submit status reports.
• Request that individual team members send you status reports.

Although you can request status reports directly from within Project, you can only review the submitted status reports in Project Web Access.

How can I manage documents or track issues and risks with Project Server?

With Project Server, you can easily manage project-related documents and track issues and risks associated with the project.

Before you can work with documents, risks, and issues in Project Server, you must create a Windows SharePoint Services Web site for your project on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. For more information about setting up Windows SharePoint Services to manage documents, risks, and issues, see your server administrator. Once set up, you can:

• Manage documents  Documents can provide others with helpful information about the project from start to finish. For easy access, an administrator can set up a document library. There are two different document library types:
  • Project document library  This document library stores documents that are related to a specific project. Access to documents in this library depends on permissions set for project managers, team members, and other stakeholders. Required document properties are defined by an administrator for the organization. Authorized users can create additional document libraries for the project. Project managers, who by default have design list permission, can make changes to specific document libraries.
  • Public document library  This document library stores documents that are available to all users in an organization. Access to documents in this library is defined by the server administrator. Although any user can contribute documents to this library, only an authorized user can create and customize public document libraries.
• Track issues   Issue tracking improves the efficiency and effectiveness of project management because it allows you to communicate about problems and related actions with team members and stakeholders. Issues can be associated with projects, tasks, and documents so that you can keep track of their status, and they are clearly marked by an issue indicator. Depending on actions taken to resolve issues, issues appear as active, closed, or postponed. You can set up e-mail notifications to alert you that issues have been opened, assigned, or updated.
• Track risks   Risk tracking increases your chances for a successful project, by identifying and planning for potential problems, and enabling you to monitor the project for risks as it progresses. Risks can be associated with projects, tasks, issues, and other risks. You specify the probability and impact of each risk, and Project calculates your exposure. You can specify a trigger that identifies when the risk has occurred, and a contingency plan to handle the risk if it does occur.

Does Project Server work with Outlook?

If your organization uses Project Server, team members can use the add-in for Outlook (downloadable from the Tasks page in Project Web Access) to view their project task assignments in the calendar view of Outlook. Moreover, team members can update project status from Outlook.

In Outlook, team members can:

• Display their project tasks in the Outlook calendar and specify that the tasks appear as free or busy time.
• Create new or update status on project tasks in Outlook.
• Easily go to the Project Web Access timesheet from Outlook.
• Enter nonworking time, such as vacation time or days off, and update the project with the nonworking time.

In their Project Web Access timesheets, users can:

• View (but not edit) Outlook tasks.
• Incorporate Outlook Busy and Out of Office calendar entries and send some or all of these nonworking time entries to the project manager to update their calendars in Project.
• Include Web Parts from Project Server on Outlook digital dashboards.

< Back to top >