Project 2007 Quick Reference Guide
What is it?
Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007 gives you robust project management tools with the right
blend of usability, power, and flexibility, so you can manage projects more efficiently and effectively. You
can stay informed, control project work, schedules, and finances, and keep project teams aligned, while
becoming more productive through integration with familiar 2007 Microsoft Office system programs,
powerful reporting options, as well as guided planning, wizards, and templates.
Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 includes all the capabilities in Office Project Standard
2007. In addition, Office Project Professional 2007 provides enterprise project management capabilities
when connected to Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.
The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, based on Office Project
Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, helps you align people, investments, and
work with business priorities; automate project management processes, manage portfolios, and create
effective communication and collaboration across the organization; and manage work from ad-hoc
projects to complex programs across the entire project life cycle.
Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 helps your organization identify, select, manage, and
deliver portfolios that align with your strategic priorities. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 is a key
component of the Microsoft Office EPM Solution and helps ensure that you gain visibility, insight, and
control across your project, program, and application portfolios.
How Do I sell It
Target Customers
Office Project Standard 2007 is for individual users who manage projects independently.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution addresses the needs of a variety of roles in an organization,
including:
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Executives who allocate funds and oversee projects, programs, and portfolios.
Project managers and staff who create and manage projects.
Resource managers who work with staff and assets.
Team members who work on projects.
Administrators and IT staff who manage and extend the solution.
Office Project Standard 2007 allows you to:
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Get Productive Quickly: Better organize work and people to help ensure projects are delivered
on time and within budget.
Understand and Control Project Schedules and Finances: Effectively track and analyze
projects with a better understanding of the schedule and impact of changes.
Effectively Communicate and Present Project Information: Improve the organization of
your projects and people with the scheduling power and capabilities of Office Project Standard
2007
Microsoft Office Enterprise Management Solution allows you to:
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Align Resources to Strategy: Identify, prioritize, and invest in projects and programs with
Budget Tracking.
Enhance Your Business Intelligence: Monitor performance, visualize trends, manage risks,
and identify investment gaps.
Collaborate and Coordinate Easily: Access timely, business-critical project information so that
teams can share knowledge, collaborate smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and adjust
activities quickly to accommodate project changes and updates.
Manage Resources Effectively: Accurately assess needs to effectively deploy resources and
create plans for your organization so that you have the right people on your critical projects for
optimal delivery.
Manage the Entire Project Life Cycle: Propose and initiate projects in the Web client, then
"promote" projects on the centralized Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 for tracking budgets
and resources. Get a comprehensive view of your entire portfolio of work at all stages for better
decision making.
Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 allows you to:
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Automate and Enforce Project Portfolio Management Governance Processes: Quickly
define and automate your project portfolio management (PPM) governance processes with the
workflow designer.
Consolidate and Standardize Data Collection: Customize forms to streamline and
standardize the collection of data for each investment across your organization.
Prioritize and Effectively Evaluate Competing Investments: Use best practices techniques
to automatically derive prioritization scores and develop intuitive charts to help you effectively
evaluate the competing investments from varying angles.
Select Portfolios that Best Align with Your Business Strategy: Optimize and select
portfolios that best align with your organization’s strategic priorities.
Manage Portfolio Performance Effectively: Measure and track the performance of each
investment throughout its life cycle to help ensure you realize the forecasted benefits.
Target Industries and Functions
• IT Governance
• Product Development
• Quality Management with Six Sigma
• Professional Services Automation
• Project, resource, and risk management
• Industries such as construction, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government, retail, financial services,
and healthcare
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do the products in the Office Project 2007 family work together, and who should use which?
Office Project 2007 has two types of offerings designed for different needs:
• Office Project Standard 2007 is a desktop program for individual users who manage projects
independently.
• The EPM Solution combines Office Project Server 2007, Office Project Professional 2007, Office Project
Web Access, Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, and Office Project Portfolio Web Access to form a
business solution for organizations, departments, and teams.
2. What languages is Office Project 2007 localized in?
Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simple), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek,
Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese
(European), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
3. What languages is Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 localized in?
English only
4. What new features are in Office Project Standard 2007 and Office Project Professional
2007?
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Background Cell Highlighting: Change the background color of cells in the table portion of
the view.
Change Highlighting: When you change a project, all affected tasks can be automatically
highlighted (e.g., dependencies and summary task). The highlights reflect the most recent
change.
Cost Resources: The resource type for fixed costs assignable to a task. Cost resource
accurately monitors project financials by assigning multiple costs to a task, tying costs to account
codes, and rolling up costs against budgets.
Desktop Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Cube: Create customer reports or archive
Office Project Standard 2007 or Office Project Professional 2007 values with data exported from
Office Project 2007 into a Microsoft Office Access 2007 database and OLAP cubes.
Multiple Level Undo: You can reverse your most recent series of changes to views, data, and
options.
Task Drivers Pane: This pane appears to the left of the table portion of the view, showing
prerequisite tasks and resource constraints that drive the start data of the selected task. Click
these drivers to link to relevant information.
Budget Tracking: A manager can define a budget at a high level (program or project) so that
the project manager can allocate funds and track costs against the budget.
Visual Reports: Use Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 (or later) spreadsheet software and Microsoft
Office Visio® Professional 2007 drawing and diagramming software to produce charts, graphs,
and diagrams based on Office Project 2007 data.
5. What is new in Project Web Access?
The new Project Web Access features include an enhanced user interface, a recycle bin, list item
versioning and history, the ability to track work lists and then promote or publish these into full projects,
and great access to desktop and administrative functions. Office Project 2007 streamlines the process for
provisioning project workspaces.
6. What are the new features in Office Project Server 2007?
The new Office Project Server 2007 features include:
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Active Cache: Office Project Professional 2007 will interact with Office Project Server 2007
through a local cache.
Assignment Owner: This is the individual who has the responsibility for entering actual work or
reporting progress against the assignment. Users can track time and assignments for other types
of resources such as generic, cost, or material resources.
Cube Building Service: Build portfolio analyzer cubes for end-user reporting with more data
options through a flexible graphical user interface.
Deliverables: Project managers can create a Windows® SharePoint® Services list of items to
which they commit dates such as milestones. Other projects can then create cross-project
dependency links to these deliverables.
Event Model: Developers can extend the Office Project 2007 functionality by developing custom
event handlers and associating them with events raised by Office Project Server 2007. An event
is a message sent by an object to signal the occurrence of an action, which could be caused by a
user interaction such as a mouse click or triggered by some other program logic.
Multi-Currency Support: Define an exchange rate table for each project.
Programs: Collections of projects to accomplish a large objective. The program level supports
key performance indicators (KPIs), analysis, and reporting.
Queuing Service: This server-side service queues work requests pending server availability,
which provides greater resiliency and use of server resources.
Reporting Data Service: Extracts data from the Project Server Publish, Working, and Version
databases, transforms the data into a format suitable for end-user reporting and Analysis
Services cube building, and loads it into the Reporting database.
Server-side Scheduling: With server-side scheduling, if a third party builds a front end,
winproj.exe no longer has to be installed on each client, because the server contains the
scheduling engine. This reduces license needs from Office Project Professional 2007 to a Client
Access License (CAL).
Timesheets: In Office Project 2007, you can enter times for more than Office Project 2007
activities and non-project time. Time can be linked to project tasks and can also be run
independently. You no longer need an assignment and can capture time at different levels, such
as against the summary task, project, or account code level, instead of just for individual tasks.
7. How does Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 integrate with Office Project Server 2007?
Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 integrates with Office Project Server 2007 to provide organizations
with an end-to-end PPM solution. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 includes the Office Project Server
Gateway, a bidirectional link with Office Project Server
2007. By using the Office Project Server Gateway, administrators can import, export, and synchronize
phases and milestones, resource requirement data (budget, actual, and forecast), and resource
availability, data, and enterprise fields between the two environments.
8. Can Office Project Professional 2007 connect to a server running Project Server 2003?
No, it cannot connect to the server. However, Project 2003 and Office Project 2007 clients can be run
side-by-side on the same computer.
EPM Solution System Requirements: Windows Server® 2003 and Windows Server CALs, Windows
SharePoint Services version 3.0 (a component technology for Windows Server 2003), Microsoft SQL
Server™ 2000 or newer versions and SQL Server CALs, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0requirements