The right choice for online project management is Microsoft Project Server
December 18, 2018

The right choice for online project management is Microsoft Project Server

Cristian Bodnarasec | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Project Server

We use Microsoft Project Server for project planning: tasks assignment, project team management, resources allocation, project cost and tracking. In our organization it is used by the software development team. It provides us a unique place to manage all the software development projects and also enables the team members to update the progress of their tasks which reflects in the project plan.
  • Project planning: tasks assignments, resources allocation, progress and cost tracking. The Server version is the natural extension of the Microsoft Project standalone.
  • Provides one place to manage all projects, accessible by everyone in the team. This opens the plan updates to team members as well(on their tasks), as opposed to being done only by the project manager.
  • Reporting and visualization - resources utilization, timeline etc
  • The integration with the Microsoft Project standalone: if you don't like the web version, you can download the latest and work locally. When done just sync it back to the server.
  • In many cases the server or cloud version of any tool will have some limitations compared to the standalone version. It is the same here, however the existing integration between the two will help you work locally and upload changes to the server if you don't feel comfortable working on the web version.
  • The learning curve for both Microsoft Project and the server version tends to be steep for some users
  • Needs an Outlook integration
  • The cost for implementation and licensing needs improvement, it can be very expensive for some smaller companies.
  • It helped reducing the cost with managing the projects by reducing the time spent by project managers tracking everything offline and in different ways(i.e. Excel)
  • It reduced the time for reaching the milestones in the projects. Having the visibility into the up-to-date status of the project will enable the project manager taking the right actions and decisions at the right time.
  • Resource sharing across projects helped keeping the people 100% utilized.
We tried few years ago to use Basecamp for our project management. Even though Basecamp is a much more easier to use tool with nice visualization and graphics, it didn't work out because the project managers are more use to the Excel way of doing things, which Project Professional and Project Server are doing.
You will be able to do the project management (scheduling, tasks assignment, resources allocation, cost tracking) for all your projects in one place, where the team members can contribute and keep the plans up to date. The web version does the main job right but if you find it more difficult to use you just use the standalone Microsoft Project and upload the changes back to the server.