Bamboo Applications & Accelerators 2011 Year in Review with Bamboo PM Girl
Published 01/06 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
Editor's note: 2011 was another incredibly productive year at Bamboo, seeing growth in every measurable category, not least of which was the size of our product line. As we wrap up the first week of the new year, let's take a few moments today to look back on the past year's accomplishments (and also sneak a few peeks into what's in store for the year ahead) with each of our product management team leads...
You took on ownership of several new products this year, including some existing offerings as well as a handful of brand new products. Which existing products did you assume responsibility for?
Joining Product Management Central (PM Central) were: Chart Plus Web Part, Site Creation Plus, Task Master, Navigators, Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator, Project Portfolio Dashboard, and Grant Management Solution Accelerator.
What prompted your assuming ownership of those existing components and solution accelerators? Were those products simply so closely aligned with your flagship product, PM Central, that it just made logistical sense to bring them under your umbrella?
Yes, the majority of the components and solution accelerators are core players on "team PM Central." Being the product manager for those components and accelerators is important since they play major roles in reporting, dashboarding, task scheduling, charting, navigation, and site creation for PM Central. I want to be able to add important enhancements not only to PM Central as a whole, but also add enhancements that make sense for the individual component products which are included in the larger application.
In the particular case of Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator, it's important to add enhancements in order to improve user experience, as well as to add reporting and search capabilities. At the same time, I need to be focused on PM Central and its core components, therefore for the upcoming year, I will transfer the responsibility for Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator over to Jeff Kozloff.
In addition to taking on ownership of those existing products, your team also brought several key new releases to market as well, including Bamboo's latest application, Community Central. That product premiered at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim to an overwhelmingly positive response. What's in store for Community Central in the year ahead?
The strongest function of Community Central at present are its forum feature (where users can lock a topic, add ratings, verify answers, etc.) and its search capability. However, there are many other important features that we want to bring to Community Central, and in the upcoming year, we plan to provide features such as microblogging, social bookmarking, track back, additional analytics and reporting, additional features for the discussion boards/forums, activity streams, custom alerts and workflows, as well as making Community Central available on other devices such as mobile handsets and tablets.
Additionally, in order to ensure that Project Management Central is the best collaboration platform in SharePoint that it can be, we plan to integrate it with Community Central.
In the months ahead, we're excited to migrate Bamboo Nation to SharePoint, and will be using Community Central to add the key features and functionality necessary to maintain the community site's current environment ... and take it places it hasn't been able to go in the past.
Packed with new features and Microsoft Project Professional integration points, version 3.0 of PM Central was recently released for both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. Of the new features and functionality available in the latest release, if you had to identify the top three, which would you choose to spotlight?
- We appreciate that PM Central has been recognized as a great platform for project management and collaboration in SharePoint. However, we also recognize that many project managers prefer to create their project schedules in Microsoft Project Pro. Therefore, in the latest release, we made it easier for project managers to import their project schedule from Microsoft Project into a PM Central tasks list, and be able to sync the changes between their PM Central tasks list and the Microsoft Project .mpp.
- Since most people don't work on the weekends, in order to calculate accurate schedules, we added the ability to allow users to exclude weekends and holidays when estimating schedules and timelines.
- Several important features were added to improve user experience, such as synching the resource information with their user profile when adding resources so they do not have to retype all the information.
Realizing that the version 3.0 release cycle was only just recently completed, it may be too soon to ask, but could you share some of the new features that are on the drawing board for upcoming releases of PM Central in the year ahead?
There are a lot of features we will be adding during the coming year. Here are some of the highlights:
- While adding more features to PM Central is certainly beneficial for most customers, doing so might be too much for others who don't need to do complex things like resource management. We will add a "PMC Light" option for customers who just want to manage simple projects, and users who are in the early stages of project management maturity will be able to select this option to track only tasks and schedules without having to deal with resource management, cost management, etc.
- Some organizations might have more than three tiers (portfolio, department, and project). We will be adding functionality to allow users to create multiple tiers.
- Customers want to be able to assign multiple resource to the same task. This will be available in one of the releases in the upcoming year.
- Customers want to be able to show tasks from multiple projects in a central place via Task Master. This will be available in one of the releases in the upcoming year.
- Integration with Community Central so users can see their team members' activity stream as well as be able to view all the Discussion Boards in one central location.
- This year we released Time Tracking and Management for managing timesheets and an organization's workforce. This product integrates with Project Management Central. In the next release, we will add additional features to get the actual time that the users enter back to PMC to calculate the actual work.
How about new, standalone components from your team in the year ahead? Anything you're able to provide a sneak peek into at this early date?
Besides the currently planned enhancements for the previously existing products and new products that were released this year (such as Time Tracking and Management, Community Central, and Discussion Board Plus), we're currently considering adding one new product, "Requirements Management." Requirements Management would be integrated with Project Management Central, and would be important to customers who are doing product and project management, since it's necessary to not only track the requirements but be able to do the traceability throughout all phases.
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