EPM 2007
And now for something a little different....
The breadth of products that Microsoft offers is amazing.
From point-of-sale products, to education products, to office products to --- amazingly -- Enterprise Project Management (EPM).
I'm getting ready to visit a client and do some work for them installing a suite of products that Microsoft calls EPM 2007. This is comprised of three products:
Project Professional 2007 (Project Pro)
Project Server 2007 (PS)
Project Portfolio Server 2007 (PPS)
With PPS, this is primarily suited to the enterprise space (where there are a metric gazillion projects to be managed and determination of project priority and risk management of those projects can be major tasks). PS and PPS are both web-based, and PS is also SharePoint based (it works fine with WSS 3.0, with additional functionality exposed when using MOSS 2007).
Project Pro differs from Project Standard primarily in that it can connect to PS and collaborate between a number of users. Project Standard is primarily a standalone application.
Project Pro can connect to PS and integrates with Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 via tasks and calendars to manage projects.
With PS, you can submit enterprise projects and project proposals (and promote proposals to projects) and collaborate and reports on all tasks, projects and proposals.
PPS moves up even another step to allow you to do risk management, governance, portfolio review, and other enterprise level functionality.
Interesting stuff. If you have a few minutes, sometime you should take a look at http://microsoft.com/office/projectserver