The concept that collaborative planning is vital to successful development is gaining momentum throughout the software industry, causing a shift away from traditional, top-down hierarchies toward collaborative team structures. Microsoft Project Central, the Web-based companion to Microsoft Project 2000, provides tools that support collaboration among teams and workgroups, using the accessibility and availability of information on Windows-based intranets to promote broader participation in planning and to provide unprecedented visibility to project information.

Improving productivity by involving everyone

Microsoft Project Central facilitates clear communication of project data both up and down the management chain and allows project managers to draw on the expertise of resources and team members. This is achieved by providing workers at all levels of the organization with up-to-date project information and a means for input to the project manager — even for users with limited knowledge of project management methodology and no familiarity with Microsoft Project.

Microsoft Project Central offers unique benefits to users performing varied roles in the organization, including:

• Project managers   Those responsible for planning and scheduling and for maintaining the project plan in Microsoft Project 2000. When using Microsoft Project Central to involve the workgroup, project managers retain complete control of the master project plan; however, they also benefit from the increased involvement of others within the organization, leading to more synergistic planning and more informed decision making.
• Team members   Workers identified as "resources" within the project plan. More and more frequently, resources are expected to participate in planning tasks, estimating work, and tracking status. Microsoft Project Central provides a customizable, easy-to-use tool that enables team members to keep track of their own tasks and to see their work in relation to the entire project.
• Resource managers and team managers   Those responsible for assigning resources to projects or tasks a project and/or for assessing organizational staffing needs. Microsoft Project Central helps these managers ensure efficient use of existing resources and anticipate future demands for staffing or headcount. In addition, it provides features that enable assignment and delegation of work among functional teams in support of a larger, multidisciplinary project.
• Senior manager/stakeholders   Anyone with an interest in the status of one or more projects across the enterprise. Microsoft Project Central provides these individuals with concise and pertinent information that shows at a glance how the organization's projects are performing against time and budget.

A new model for collaborative planning

In the Microsoft Project Central collaboration model, the project manager creates and maintains the project plan and schedule in Microsoft Project 2000. The project manager makes information available to users by publishing data from Microsoft Project 2000 to the Microsoft Project Central database, which is stored and maintained independently of the project plan.

Microsoft Project Central enables team members to participate in planning tasks, estimating work, and tracking status. Users submit updates and proposed changes as messages delivered to the project manager's project inbox. The project manager reviews messages from team members before approving the changes, acting as the interface between the master project plan and Microsoft Project Central. Depending on options set and permissions allowed to the Microsoft Project Central users, Microsoft Project Central can automate acceptance of project updates, schedule reminders, and compile status reports, freeing the project manager from the burden of many routine administrative tasks.

The Microsoft Project Central administration module enables an extremely detailed degree of control over the information and authority granted to each user or group of users. Depending on the size of the organization and the project manager's comfort and familiarity with the tools, the project manager may function as the project administrator or rely on IT (information technology) staff to oversee the installation and configuration of Microsoft Project Central.

Key features

• Status Reporting   Microsoft Project Central includes the ability both to design templates for text-based status reports and to send status requests to workgroup members. Completed status reports can be reviewed and edited in Microsoft Project Central and compiled to include information for the entire team in a single report.
• Message Rules   To expedite acceptance of task requests, delegations, and task updates received from team members, the project manager creates rules that automatically accept specified changes when they are run on a set of messages. Microsoft Project Central includes highly detailed criteria for developing rules; rules can be applied to individual users, to groups of users, to specific actions, or only to actions with a specified impact on budget or schedule.
• Task creation   Allowing resources to propose tasks and subtasks is the key to implementing bottom-up scheduling scenarios. In addition, it allows team members a clear way to communicate additional work or to propose adjustments when the project plan doesn't accurately reflect the team member's assessment of work scope.
• Task updates   Microsoft Project Central ensures accurate tracking by making it easy for resources to enter their actuals and submit this information directly to the project manager. When team members estimate percent complete or enter actual hours spent on an assigned task, the remaining work for the task is calculated automatically, and an update message is sent to the project manager.
• Task delegation   When enabled by the project manager, task delegation allows a Microsoft Project Central user to assign a task to another resource and sends a message to the project manager indicating that the task has been reassigned. Delegation enables the project manager to make effective use of functional managers or leads, who can delegate a group of assigned tasks to their own team members or direct reports.
• Presentation features  Microsoft Project Central's rich presentation features ensure that users always know what's going on, even if they don't have Microsoft Project 2000 on their desktops. Users can view project information in custom ways and at varying levels of detail, depending on their own preferences and the information made available to them by the project manager or administrator. Team members can manage their own time more effectively, keeping track of their own tasks and viewing their tasks in relation to the projects or projects, while resource managers and business development managers benefit from a concise, action-oriented view of project information, which facilitating organizational planning at the highest level.
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook   Microsoft Project Central enables users who rely on the Calendar and Tasks features of the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client for managing their day-to-day schedules to participate fully in the collaborative planning environment. Microsoft Project Central can capture a user's Tasks list from Microsoft Outlook, combining it with project-related activities to present a single to-do list. Or, users who prefer the Microsoft Outlook interface can display the Microsoft Project Central task views within Microsoft Outlook 2000, creating a single application home for e-mail, tasks, schedule, and schedule tracking.

In addition, Microsoft Project Central users can import schedule data from their own Microsoft Outlook Calendars, informing the project manager of all scheduled meetings, time off, and any outside commitments or potential conflicts. The project manager can add these exceptions to the resource calendars in the master project plan, ensuring greater accuracy in resource allocation by taking into account both project-related and nonproject-related time commitments.

A platform for development

Microsoft Project Central provides an ideal platform for development of custom planning, scheduling, and project management solutions. Because it is built on Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) and uses Microsoft's Web-based technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and ActiveX® controls, developers can access application services programmatically to create custom applications or to extend the functionality of Microsoft Project Central to meet the specialized needs of the organization. (When building solutions that incorporate the Microsoft Project Central controls, developers must be aware that such solutions are not freely distributable, and must include a Microsoft Project Central license.)

Programmers familiar with basic Web development should have no difficulty modifying the Microsoft Project Central interface by adding text, images, or other elements; or incorporating the Microsoft Project Central data objects (for example, Gantt Charts and task views) into their own Web pages or HTML interfaces.

Developers can also access the business logic behind Microsoft Project Central and use the Microsoft Project Central ActiveX controls to create solutions that combine the functionality of Microsoft Project Central with a separate Microsoft SQL Server™ or Oracle data source. Such solutions could include adding new fields or tables to the Microsoft Project Central database, or adding new databases, with corresponding updates to the query engine and business logic.

A cost-effective solution

Through its use of three-tier, thin-client architecture, Microsoft Project Central provides a solution suitable for a small enterprise or for departments and workgroups within a larger enterprise. Microsoft Project 2000 is shipped with both server-side and client-side components, including Microsoft Project Central (single client license) and the Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE).

Users who access project data via Microsoft Project Central require access to the Microsoft Project Central Web server, either over the corporate intranet or by direct dial-up. On clients using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, Microsoft Project Central Server uses the Internet Explorer component installation model to detect and install the necessary components when the user first accesses the server. Users who do not have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later must manually install the Browser Module for Microsoft Project Central, a stand-alone browser module.

For users who will use only Microsoft Project Central, additional client licenses must be purchased through the Microsoft Select or Open Licensing programs. Because organizations have the option to purchase only Microsoft Project Central client licenses for these users, Microsoft Project Central provides a cost-effective ways to deliver project knowledge to team members, resources, and other stakeholders who currently have no project planning or scheduling tools on their desktops, involving a broader segment of the organization into the collaborative planning environment.

Conclusion

As a companion to Microsoft Project 2000, Microsoft Project Central enables organizations to adopt a truly collaborative approach to planning and scheduling. And only through effective collaboration – both the involvement of resources in planning and tracking and communication up and down management chain – can organizations remain competitive in a dynamic business environment. In an era when timely access to information is vital to success, Microsoft Project Central ensures that the critical information is available to everyone in the organization.