Microsoft Project Professional 2002

Keeping track of multiple projects across a large organization is a daunting task when projects are competing for resources and money. Project Professional lets you centralize specific and generic resources in the company address book and monitor them across projects. You can start by assigning generic resources as placeholders when you plan a project and then automatically allocate whichever real resources are available, using the Resource Substitution wizard. You can still allocate specific resources and people yourself, and you can choose whether to share resources.

Most of the collaborative tools in this version rely on running Microsoft Project Server 2002. With Project Server you can create and share documents, templates, and custom fields for resources and tasks to make sure everyone is working the same way. Enterprise templates let you make sure projects follow procedures and stick to the organization's calendars and working hours. Put generic resources in the templates and the Team Builder tools will automatically find the people you need to work on them.

There are many extra tools in Project Professional designed to work with Project Server. Use these tools to fill in specific details that your company needs to track projects, build and share the enterprise templates, and manage and share resources. If you need only basic project management tools check out Project 2002, but if you want to manage people, resources, and systems across departments or an entire organization, Project Professional is the right choice. --Mary Branscombe, Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Product Description
Intended to be used with Microsoft Project Server 2002, Microsoft Project Professional 2002 is Microsoft's new enterprise project management program. Project Professional has all the core project management features found in Microsoft Project Standard, so you can manage your project plans, communicate project status, and report project information quickly and efficiently. When used with Microsoft Project Server, it also includes enterprise resource management capabilities and portfolio management features, such as real-time reporting and scenario analysis tools. These tools enable project managers and business decision-makers to view project and resource information across their department or the entire organization.

Microsoft Project Server centrally stores the project and resource information published from Microsoft Project Professional. Microsoft Project Server extends this information to project teams through its Web portal, called Microsoft Project Web Access. You can then use Web Access's Resource Center to view, group, and edit resource information and even evaluate resource utilization and availability across multiple projects.

Note: To achieve the full benefit of the enterprise resource and portfolio management features, Microsoft Project Professional must be used with Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project Server Client Access License(s) (CALs).

Product Description
Manage your project plans, communicate project status, and report project information quickly and efficiently. When used with Microsoft Project Server, it also includes enterprise resource management capabilities and portfolio management features, such as real-time reporting and scenario analysis tools.

However, what continues to hold this back as a slick looking, but not so useful, tool is the fact that it still cannot correctly compute earned value, and the lack of emphasis on planning and estimating. It's a wonderful GANTT chart creator if you don't mind it doing what it wants instead of what you want, and comes close to Lotus Notes as a project specific collaboration tool.

If you want to actually plan and control projects though you'll be disappointed. Also, if you are in a large company the chances are you are either mainframe, midrange or Unix centric and the sharepoint server and other MS platforms may raise your total costs of ownership (not to mention wreaking havoc with availability and security vulnerabilities).