Microsoft Project 2003 Nears Completion

One Office Systems 2003 product is scheduled to hit the streets--or be released to manufacturing, anyway--next week.

Microsoft is slated to start duping disks for Office Project 2003 on Monday, the company said.

This version continues the product's evolution from a stand-alone offering to one that fosters and supports collaboration, said Giovanni Mezgec, group product manager. It focuses more on process management and bringing project management tools to an audience beyond project managers per se.

Among the biggest improvements are new and better document- and content-management, as well as better ties to the Outlook mail client, said Kristin Ippensen, alliance manager for PM Solutions, a Havertown, Pa.-based solution provider. "So many people spend their day in Outlook and a browser, that this is really important," she said.

She also lauded the product's reliance on the Windows SharePoint Services capabilities embedded in Windows Server 2003. "This allows customers to tie together their Project information to work papers and be able to collaborate on those documents. ... There are much more powerful check-in, check-out capabilities," she said.

The Outlook new bidirectional Outlook integration means that a person's project folders now show up on the Outlook user interface, said Giovanni Mezgec, group product manager for Project.

Rival offerings include project management products from Primavera, as well as project management capabilities built into SAP, PeopleSoft and other enterprise applications.

The umbrella offering, called the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, comprises three piece parts: Project Professional 2003, Project Server 2003 and Project Web Access, which provides browser-based access to project information. The company will continue to offer a standard version more focused on single users. Estimated retail price will be $1499 for the Server, $999 for Professional, and $500 for Standard, according to Microsoft. Project Web Access is offered as a client-access license (CAL).

Standard Edition still targets stand-alone users.

As the Office Systems products--Office itself and component applications, as well as FrontPage, Visio, and Project--dribble out, the company continues to plan a big launch event for this fall.

And, even as Office Systems 2003 struggles to get through the starting gate, the company is revamping the development process for the subsequent "Longhorn" release of Office, aka Office 12. The goal is to get to clean, secure code earlier in the development process and reduce iterations, the company confirmed (see story).

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