Announcing the Release of SharePoint Project Management Central R1.5 - An Add-On for Resource Management, MS Office Project Integration and More!
Published 11/12 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions CommunitySince the release of R1.0 of PM Central, we have been collecting feedback from early adopters and independent experts who have evaluated the solution. We recognized that the two additional capabilities that were critically needed were Resource Management and the ability to import tasks from MS Office Project, and your feedback confirmed the importance of adding these features. As the product manager for this product, and with a background in project management, I’m excited to tell you that these are exactly the key new features in the new release, along with much more.
The PM Central R1.5 empowers you with the following additional capabilities:
1. Resource Management:
- Create Resource Pool
- Cost Management
- Resource Allocation and Capacity Planning with new canned and ad-hoc reports
- Gantt view of Resource Assignments with the ability to print selected areas (all, grid, or gantt)
2. Importing and exporting tasks:
- Importing from MS Office Project 2007 schedule to your tasks list
- Exporting to MS Office Project 2007 from PM Central project site’s tasks list to MS Office Project 2007 schedule
- Exporting to MS Office Project 2007 from the Portfolio site's aggregated view of all projects' tasks
3. Verifying Product Version
- Clearly indicate the PM Central product version, as well as that of the included Web Parts, via the Product Version Page
Here are the details:
Resource Management
In a large organization where you have shared resources who are working on concurrent tasks from multiple projects and with dependencies, project managers are often faced with managing multiple projects with varying schedules as well as resource costs and conflicts. PM Central allows you to create a resource pool at the portfolio level and for project managers to select their resources from this pool at the project level. When project managers plan tasks and resources, the assignments and allocations are displayed in the Resource Assignments Gantt View as well as in the Resource Allocation and Capacity Planning View. At a glance, you can tell which resource is over-allocated and can reassign the activity to someone else. Project managers can also run reports to show the Work per Project, Resource Availability and Resource Assignments.
Cost can be assigned to tasks or by a resource’s standard rate and established team resources costs. Cost then can be controlled and analyzed. Project managers can proactively manage and provide reports to alert upper management as to which specific tasks are the bottlenecks. The information is there to help you answer the “What if?” questions, such as what is the impact to the budget if resource A is replaced by a more expensive resource B? This additional information provides additional data points to manage risks and issues as well.
Importing and exporting tasks
Most project managers, myself included, are familiar and accustomed to doing a project schedule using MS Office Project, especially when a project contains hundreds of tasks with dependencies. It is quite cumbersome to import tasks into a SharePoint Tasks list using a spreadsheet and then have to recreate the task summaries and dependencies all over again. With PM Central R1.5, we provide you the ability to import and export tasks with dependencies and parent-child relationships via the new Bamboo MS Office Project Add-In. The Add-In comes free with the PM Central R1.5 product.
Verifying Product Version
In previous versions of PM Central, it was difficult for users to tell which version of PM Central they were running, and it was also difficult to determine the version numbers of the individual Web Parts that are packaged in the PM Central bundle. In R1.5, we clearly display this information via the Product Version Page:
Visit the Bamboo Solutions Storefront to download and try the SharePoint Project Management Central free for 30-days.
The following Knowledge Base articles provide you the steps for a head start with the new features:
HOWTO: Upgrading Project Management Central from 1.0/1.1/1.2 to 1.5
HOWTO: Utilize the Resource Pool to Assign Tasks
INFO: Managing Cost and Actual Cost in PM Central R1.5 or Newer Version
INFO: Utilize the Resource Allocation and Capacity Planning as well as Reports for Resource Management
HOWTO: Utilize the Bamboo MS Project Add-In to import multiple tasks into SharePoint Tasks List from MS Office Project 2007 with PM Central R1.5 or Newer Version
HOWTO: Export Tasks from a Tasks List or from the portfolio site's aggregated view of all projects' tasks to MS Office Project 2007
HOWTO: Tell What Version of Bamboo Products your server is Running with PM Central R1.5
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