Microsoft Project Aims at the Enterprise

by Bob McMillan

May 9, 2002 —

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 -- via XML functions for example -- from legacy
human-resources applications, and used to build project teams, Zaragoza
said. Automated tools allow project managers to build teams based on
available personnel and resources.

Project managers can also use the data captured in the Project Server to
help guide them in using the software's new enterprise project
templates, Zaragoza said. The templates can be used to kick-start
project planning, rather than starting new project plans from scratch.

The new Project suite can be seen as a key to Microsoft's plans to build
up a family of enterprise resource management (ERP) products, according
to Dennis Byron, vice president of the Enterprise Applications Research
Department at market-research company IDC, in Framingham, Massachusetts.
IDC is owned by International Data Group Inc., the IDG News Service's
parent company.

"Microsoft is increasingly competing with the ERP players; this (new
Project) is just another logical rounding out of the product line, it
helps get them into the PSA (professional services automation) market as
well, since you can use it to do asset maintenance across the
enterprise," he said.

Microsoft will increasingly offer an integrated suite of business
resource planning tools, especially as it develops software acquired
last year of business application vendor Great Pains Software Inc.,
Byron noted. The company's planned acquisition of Navision A/S, which
had been rumored and was confirmed Tuesday, also fits into Microsoft's
plans to build a portfolio of ERP products, he said.

Byron agreed with other analysts, however, that Microsoft is not
expected to compete head-to-head with high-end ERP and project
management tools. "Microsoft will be competing in the mid-tier," Byron
said.

Long-time users of Primavera Systems Inc.'s namesake software, for
example, who manage complex construction and engineering projects that
are months or years long, and tap hundreds or thousands of workers and
sub-projects, are unlikely to switch to Project.

"It appears that Microsoft is heading in the right direction, but
Primavera will still have a strong position on the high end; high-end
users need those kind of features, that let you break tasks down into
many different subtasks," said Ed Yourdon, a project-management
consultant and chairman of Cutter Consortium in Arlington,
Massachusetts.

However, Microsoft is working with a variety of vendors and consultants
to offer corporations help in building mission-critical enterprise
planning applications. Some of these vendors include ERP developers.

The list of companies that will work with Project to help companies
build planning applications include, according to Microsoft, Siebel
Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc. KPMG Consulting Inc., Rational Software
Corp., and Business Engine Software Corp. Business Engine will
incorporate Project into its own software, and similar initiatives will
be announced later in the year, the company said.

Some of the enterprise resource allocation functions in Project 2002 are
a result of work Microsoft had already done to integrate third-party
products, such as eLabor Inc.'s Enterprise Project software, into the
product, noted Matt Light, a research director with market research
company Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Connecticut. The integration of
eLabor software into Project was the result of a 2000 agreement struck
between the companies.

Though Microsoft may not compete with the likes of Primavera or ERP
stalwart SAP AG anytime soon, especially in the world of huge
construction and manufacturing projects, the portfolio resource features
will help give Project a firmer footing in the corporate world, Light
added.

"The enterprise has been 'projectized;' this has been a major trend in
corporations, with work organized into projects, and has been for some
time ... as opposed to the older, hierarchical corporate structure
model. These project teams have senior management visibility," Light
said.

IDC's Byron noted that many corporate project teams are much smaller
than those traditionally associated with, for example, construction
projects, and so the opportunity for Microsoft to appeal to a broad
market is great. For 2000, the last year for which IDC has firm figures
for the project management market, Microsoft had about 50 percent of the
world's US$1.3 billion market for the software category.

ITworld