Growing up, I was quite passionate about cycling – to a point that, in my mind, competing at the Tour de France was not out of sight.
Growing up, I was quite passionate about cycling – to a point that, in my mind, competing at the Tour de France was not out of sight. I remember cycling along the scenic Manila Bay one summer and a bunch of cyclists went by me – zoom! I tried to catch up but failed. It dawned on me that I can only go so fast with my average bicycle that didn’t come with all the extra gears and lightweight material that the other cyclists had.
Growing up, I was quite passionate about cycling – to a point that, in my mind, competing at the Tour de France was not out of sight. I remember cycling along the scenic Manila Bay one summer and a bunch of cyclists went by me – zoom! I tried to catch up but failed. It dawned on me that I can only go so fast with my average bicycle that didn’t come with all the extra gears and lightweight material that the other cyclists had.
Fast forward to 2009, and I’ve gotten feedback from people having the same feeling of reaching the limits of SharePoint (WSS or MOSS) out-of-the-box when leveraged as a Project Management Information System (PMIS). I’ve gotten comments such as:
“How can I roll-up multiple project schedules into a portfolio view?”
“Is there a way to establish task dependencies?”
“I wish there was a better alerting mechanism.”
Those days are long gone. Bamboo Solutions recently released PM Central. It’s a great add-on that takes project management with SharePoint to the next level. I had the opportunity to test drive it in a recent project I was working on.
Read moreabout my experience with PM Central at Bamboo Nation.
These are also out of the box features of Project Server 2007.09
Hi, Christophe –
Indeed Project Server has much more project management (pm) capabilities compared to OOB SharePoint and even 3rd-party pm add-ons to SharePoint.
To me, the most beneficial feature in Project Server is the ability for project managers to publish Microsoft Project plans (MPP) to Project Web Access and allow resources to update their tasks which then syncs back to the MPP. In addition, high level program/portfolio management + resource management capabilities are incomparable.
IMHO, leveraging SharePoint + 3rd party PM add-ons can be beneficial to individuals who are:
1.) Just starting with the basics of project management
2.) Not experienced with Microsoft Project at all
3.) In organizations that do not have a standardized and mature project management process
All the best!
Dux, I agree with your comments to Christophe that MOSS add-ons like PM Central, pmPoint and EPM Live provide cost-effective yet powerful “project portfolio management – light” capabilities for organisations like mine which are cost-conscious, don’t have myriads of large projects, and a limited Project Management capability. But how do we choose which one is the best?
I’d love to see you run a forum/blog/whatever comparing what is the “best of breed” between the above MOSS add-ons (and any others I don’t know about) – any chance?
Peter – I am actually working on a post. Stay tuned.
Thanks for sharing this post