Well, it is official. Microsoft Project 2010 has been formally announced at the Project Conferende in Phoenix.

Watch this site for some videos of the new features. It is a pretty exciting new release designed for people that are not familiar with scheduling engines and improved capabilities for those that are.

Major new improvements include:

- The Fluent (ribbon) UI that has the look-and-feel of Office 2007.

- Manually scheduled tasks that allows new or inexperienced Project Managers to use the tool in a way that is similar to Excel.

- A very cool new resource management view to address resource over-allocations.

- Linkage to Sharepoint 2010 (more to come on that).

- Project Server 2010 will now allow you to edit projects within a browser and without the reliance on ActiveX controls.

I will be demonstrating many of these features over the coming months but to read more, check out this Microsoft blog posting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2009/07/13/announcing-microsoft-project-2010-technical-preview.aspx

-Bill