Microsoft Corp.'s Project, long known as essentially a desktop
productivity tool, will make its debut next month as a full-fledged
corporate project and resource management product suite, the company
announced Tuesday at the NetWorld+Interop show in Las Vegas.

The new Project family of products, first discussed by the company late
last year and detailed this week at N+I, now sports a look and feel
consistent with Microsoft's Office XP product suite. But more important
for corporate executives, it incorporates new, centralized resource
allocation and monitoring functions designed to allow management of a
whole portfolio of projects, according to Product Manager Charles
Zaragoza.

Project now also incorporates XML (Extensible Markup Language) and SOAP
( Simple Object Application Protocol) functions, which bring the
project-management application into Microsoft's .Net plan for the
integration of products and applications over the Internet.

"Project has grown up and is ready for the enterprise," said Zaragoza.

Up to now, the company has sold only one version of the product.
Available next month in the U.S. and various regions around the world,
the new product family will include: Microsoft Project Standard 2002,
with an estimated retail price in the U.S. of $599; Project Professional
2002, priced at $999; and Microsoft Project Server 2002, priced at
US$1,499 including five Microsoft Project Server Client Access Licenses
(CALs). Additional Project Server CALs are priced at $179 each.

Office XP capabilities have been brought into both the Standard and
Professional versions. The product now offers, for example, adaptive
menus, which expand and offer more details when a cursor is placed over
them, and smart tags, which prompts users with ideas for using related
functions as they alter project parameters, according to Zaragoza.

Integration with Office products has been enhanced with, among other
things, streamlined data transfer with the Excel spreadsheet, he said.
The help system has been revamped with a new Project Guide that offers
Wizards that step users through setting up various project management
features.

With the release of Project Professional and Project Server, however,
Microsoft is making a major step toward offering corporate managers a
way to bring project and personnel data into a central repository, and
collaborate on allocating resources across diverse projects.

"We hit the enterprise functionality hard with this release," Zaragoza
said. In Project 2000, the company "dipped its toes" into enterprise
collaboration, with the release of Project Central, a Web-based
companion product that allows team members to enter information about
their own tasks into an overall plan and track projects. But Project
professional, coupled with Project Server, goes beyond these
capabilities.

A variety of project managers, each using Project, can store data on
Project Server, which works with Microsoft SQL Server (purchased
separately) and taps SQL (Structured Query Language) analysis and
reporting functions, according to Zaragoza. Executives, equipped with
Project Server CALs (as opposed to the actual application) use a Web
browser to monitor data in the Project Server.

Executives, via Web access, can then use the new Portfolio Analyzer as a
sort of resource control dashboard. The analyzer can be set up with
user-defined criteria, and can be used to check on the status of various
projects. Using modeling functions, executives can, for example, do
what-if analysis if they see that a project is falling behind schedule
and may have to draw on resources from other project teams.

Data can be imported

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