Microsoft is gearing up for some fairly significant releases next year with Office and SharePoint 2010 being the two most important desktop platform releases.  These releases will include significant new features and improvements.  Of course the most important applications for Project Management will be SharePoint 2010 and Project 2010.

Project 2010 will offer the new Fluent (tabbed) user interface and more significantly will have a new manual scheduling capability.  With the new manual scheduling capabilities, you will be able to create tasks that are not directly affected by the scheduling engine.  You can create project plans pretty much the same way you can in Excel, by setting dates that won’t move or even enter text directly into fields that used to be hard coded.  For example, if you need to get the duration of a task from your colleague Sharon, just enter “Get detail from Sharon” into the Duration field.  If you know tasks should start and end in a certain period but unsure of the exact dates, just type “Beginning November 09” in the Start field and “Sometime in Feb 2010” in the Finish fields.

For a quick overview of the new Project 2010 Features, you can watch a short video I put together here.

Project Server 2010 users will find making updates to plans much easier.  For example, if you wanted to do some basic project editing like adding tasks, modifying durations, assigning resources to tasks and the like, you can now do that via the web interface.  If you are a Portfolio Server user, you will have the option to stay with the existing 2007 product or you can use the new integrated Portfolio Management capabilities of Project Server but there will be some features no longer available in the newer version.  It will be important to install the product and validate the features you need are still in place.  The good news of course is Microsoft has provided a really robust set of application programming interfaces (API’s) to build your own functionality into the tool.

In SharePoint 2010, you of course get a more polished and modern user interface.  The Fluent (tabbed) user interface has now found its way into SharePoint as well.  For PMO’s and those of you running really large programs, you will find significant new improvements in workflows.  The new SharePoint Designer is now able to build complex, shared workflows where in the past they were really limited in scope.  Since Project Server is a full-fledged SharePoint application, you will be able to create standards-based workflows that enable you to automate manual processes, like change management approvals, status report reviews and the like.

There are too many new features to cover in these Office and SharePoint 2010 products.  Keep an eye out here on my Blog and the Videos link at the top of the page for a mostly Project Management-centric view of the new technologies. For a great overview of the products as a whole, check out the links below this post.

-Bill

Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

SharePoint 2010 Beta Site:
http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx

If you are a MSDN subscriber, the links are now up for you to download the products.  Below is a screen capture I took from my MSDN page so you can see the products available.  If you do not own a MSDN subscription, I would highly recommend you invest in it.

To download on MSDN, go to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com