Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out

Overview

As a project manager using Microsoft Office Project 2003, you have probably created projects, assigned resources, tracked progress, and generated your fair share of reports . If you're working with enterprise project management and collaborating with your project team through Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003, Microsoft Office Project Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003, there are differences in how you work with your project and resources. This chapter covers these differences as they pertain specifically to the project manager.

Project 2003 enterprise project management coordinates multiple project managers in an organization dealing with potentially hundreds of projects and thousands of resources. Different stakeholders can plug into the organization's project server to obtain whatever high- level or detailed view of project information they need for their varied functions. But at the heart of this system is the individual project plan ”created and controlled by the individual project manager using Project Professional 2003.

To start using the Microsoft Project workgroup and enterprise features, you need to connect your installation of Project Professional to your organization's server running Project Server 2003. You can then log on to your server from Project Professional as well as Project Web Access 2003.

After your setup is configured and connected, you can create new enterprise projects or import existing projects to the project server. You can make full use of the enterprise resource pool to build your project team and assign those resources to the proper tasks based on their skills and availability. As you track progress, you can be in constant communication with your project team members, exchanging assignment and progress information through Project Server 2003.