Likelihood to Recommend Microsoft Project Online is suited to Turnkey Projects where more Collaboration is required in Project Progress monitoring, risk assessment and conveying, issue recording and tracking. It is less appropriate when ERP Suites other than MS Dynamics are used, i.e when Enterprises need to integrate Finance / Accounting with It and having straight project management workflow
Read full review This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
Read full review Pros I love the Gantt Chart that Microsoft Project offers me, because it provides me with a view from various aspects, it provides me with exact details about the fulfillment of tasks over a period of time, it also allows me to make comparisons with the necessary data and the fulfilled data. by the employees, in order to know exactly if the project's expectations have been met. I love the Gantt Chart that Microsoft Project offers me, because it provides me with a view from various aspects, it provides me with exact details about the fulfillment of tasks over a period of time, it also allows me to make comparisons with the necessary data and the fulfilled data by the employees, in order to know exactly if the project's expectations have been met. The alert system for the fulfillment and delay of assignments is perfect. Microsoft Project allows me to configure the task system, I can assign the necessary tasks to fulfill the project, and the software alerts me immediately if the managers are fulfilling the assignments. Read full review Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with. Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow. OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice. Read full review Cons Seems overly complicated for users sometimes in using Project and its functionalities Hard to share files for those folks who do not have MS Project, and then have to print out for them Can be confusing since it looks and feels like MS Excel Read full review Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages). Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly. During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires. OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I like using Microsoft Project. It simplifies building a schedule
Read full review It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems. Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir. OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
Read full review Usability Microsoft Project was for many years the reference tool when you were talking about project management software, even if it has some gaps. However, in the last several years, other tools emerged and covered those gaps and are getting more and more users. Microsoft needs to keep up with the trends as they did with adding Project Server. However, that needs a significant rework.
Read full review In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.
Read full review Performance The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.
Read full review Support Rating Microsoft in recent years has transformed itself and gives a positive feeling when one interacts with the company. The company is focusing on its customers and willing to go extra mile to make customers happy.The company continues to invest in its products and bringing new features from time to time. Overall it is a positive feeling to be associated with such an iconic company.
Read full review As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
Read full review In-Person Training Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
Read full review Online Training We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
Read full review Implementation Rating I wasn't part of it so I don't know
Read full review It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
Read full review Alternatives Considered While many of the above tools are extremely well-versed, Microsoft Project's largest advantage comes from it being related to the largest business productivity company in the world. Project does have its sharing limitations - but regardless, offers one of the most robust tools in the market today. Microsoft Project is built with large-scale projects in mind but is more than up to the task for smaller projects as well. However, there are options available (especially cloud-based options) that may be more fitting for higher-level projects that do not require going into the weeds.
Read full review OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
Read full review Scalability Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.
Read full review Return on Investment Project saved me, as the project manager, countless hours of digging through tickets and schedules to plan everything out. It also saved me time in adjusting the project triangle as needed, since it does so much automatically. It is costly, and since it requires extensive training to master, it's not just the high licensing cost that you need to take into account. The reporting features - even just printing out Gantt charts - makes it far easier to communicate with stakeholders. That means less time for PMs doing all of this manually, and it means less follow-up questions and delays moving forward. Read full review It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used. Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem. It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before. Read full review ScreenShots