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Microsoft Project 2007 Overview

    Project 2007 gives you the classic project scheduling tools to manage projects more efficiently and effectively - no matter where you or your team members are located. Keep project teams aligned with the most recent updates to timelines, finances, and professional tasks.

Gain Visibility and Insights

    Project 2007 tracks a wide range of information to provide you better control of your organization's activities, resources, and investments. This up-to-the-minute information enables you to analyze investments, whether they are one-time projects or complex portfolios. Use Project 2007 for reports and analysis to give you the ability to forecast realistic expectations with project teams, management, and customers.

Manage Resources

    Project 2007 gives you the means to deploy effective resources today and create future Resource Plans. Resource plans help executives sketch out high-level resource allocation before detailed plans exist. This sketch helps determine if you have the right people tasked for high-priority projects. Resource Plans help you make early decisions about staff and finances that will optimize project delivery later.

Control Project Finances

    By defining budgets for projects or programs, users gain better financial reporting and analysis, helping align work with corporate objectives. Project 2007 further supports financial control by introducing a new "Cost" resource type as well as predefining a number of new project accounting fields.
The new multiple currencies feature allows users to set rates for resources in different currencies and establish a table of exchange rate data to generate reports in a single currency.

Budget for Financial Control

    The Budget Function helps you allocate a budget and resources for your project. A budget may be specified either as financial (for example, dollar amounts for labor, materials, or other cost types), as work (full-time equivalents), or as materials. This feature enables display of the variances between the budget with the actual roll-up numbers (work, cost, actual work, and actual cost) coming from the detailed plan.

Assign Costs to Tasks

    In Project 2003, there were two types of resources: Work and Material. In Project 2007, you gain a new type of resource: cost. For each task, you can now assign multiple arbitrary costs (not based on work time) and use custom fields to specify the cost type or financial code. Cost Resources is the resource type for fixed costs assignable to a task. With Cost Resources, you can more accurately monitor project financials and keep your project in sync with data in your accounting systems by tying costs to account codes and rolling up costs against budgets. The costs are not tied to the work contours, so changing the percent complete or end date of the task will not affect Cost Resources.

Visibility Across the Entire Project Life Cycle

    Managing work effectively requires covering the whole project life cycle-from initiation with Proposals to after project completion with Activity Plans for ongoing maintenance. Proposals now enable project initiation on the Web in Office Project Web Access. Creating Proposals enables the use of business processes to track potential projects as well as capitalize on Project functionality to perform what-if analysis prior to approval. Further, storing proposal data along with project data generates the content for better portfolio decision-making.
   Project web access also supports management of activity plans, which can be used to manage the operations work that often follows completion of a project. So now you can track the full project life cycle.
   Users can see all types of work in the Project Web Access Project Center, which provides a single view of all proposals, projects, programs, and operations work for basic reporting and analysis.

Analyze and Create Custom Reports

    One of the key uses of Office Project Server 2007 is for communication, which necessitates analytical tools and professional reports.
    Easily present information in various formats according to the needs of stakeholders. You can format and print one-page schedules or other reports. Smoothly export project-related data into Word for formal documents, Excel for custom charts or spreadsheets, PowerPoint for crisp presentations, or Visio for diagrams. In addition to static reports, you can generate dynamic PivotTable reports using Excel and Visio to produce charts, graphs, and diagrams based on Project data by means of the Visual Reports feature. You can more easily define custom report templates and share them with other Project users. These reports include a data cube for drill-downs and pivots.
    To gain insights by performing custom analytics without requiring a system or database administrator, users can access the Cube Building Service (CBS) via a flexible, graphical user interface to build portfolio analyzer cubes with more data options. Users can also include custom fields in the cube. The CBS consumes metadata and data generated by the Reporting Data Service (RDS) from the reporting database to build cubes for user reporting.
   To deliver these data for reports, extract the data from the Office Project Server 2007 Publish, Working, and Version databases with RDS. The RDS transforms the data into a format suitable for user reporting and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services cube building, and loads it into the Reporting database.

Resource Management

    When scheduling an organization's work, managing resources wisely helps ensure capacity and capabilities align with current and future needs. Office Project Server 2007 adds several new features to expand its resource management capabilities.
   The Assignment Owner feature enables individuals other than the assigned resource to provide status updates on an assignment. The Assignment Owner feature also enables tracking of the use of materials (nonhuman resources) or staff who do not use Office Project Server 2007 themselves. Assignments can also be changed from the current assignment owner to a new individual as necessary.
   Team Resources enables work to be assigned to an entire team rather than an individual resource. Any member of the team can accept the assignment and report time against it. A Team Resource displays availability based on the team's aggregate capacity.

Use Enhanced Timesheet Capabilities

    Planning projects relies on knowing which resources are available and which are already scheduled with work. Timesheets provide the basis for this information in Project, but they also extend well beyond the basics to serve as input for financial systems and analyzing progress.
   Users can report how they spend their time on project and non-project activities by entering their hours and progress against project tasks, summary tasks, or non-project administrative tasks. For better integration into other timesheet and payment applications, Project includes many predefined project accounting codes such as cost codes. Full auditing will be available and, if enabled, an audit log entry will be created for all changes made when the timesheet is saved or submitted. Timesheets also support billable/non-billable fiscal periods and are 100 percent HTML-based. Project managers can approve or reject a timesheet independently from project status updates. Timesheets will track actual time worked, which can be protected through auditing. Additionally, managers can lock tasks and projects against further time tracking. Timesheets in Office Project Server 2007 offer users a much broader set of capabilities.
   Team Resources enables work to be assigned to an entire team rather than an individual resource. Any member of the team can accept the assignment and report time against it. A Team Resource displays availability based on the team's aggregate capacity.