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

As Microsoft prepares for the Beta launch of SharePoint 2010, more resources are becoming available.

The MSDN Developer portal has just been updated with a slew of tools, training, videos and Visual Studio add-ins all designed to get you up to speed.

Check out the site here:

http://bit.ly/1r7Olz

-Bill

If you haven’t visited the landing page for Microsoft Project, you might want to head back.  The site has been completely revamped with a new look and clean navigation.  To visit this site, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/default.aspx

With the announcement of Project 2010, Microsoft created a brand new site to learn more about the new features.  You can also sign up to be alerted when the Beta is released.  To get to the Office Project 2010 website, use the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/project/2010/en/us/default.aspx

-Bill

While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas I went to a session on SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Steve Fox from Microsoft presented and he did the best session so far today.

Essentially BCS is technology built into
SharePoint that allows you to build applications in SharePoint that are connected to third party systems like SAP, CRM or any other data driven applications.

- To use BCS, you will essentially need to create a lot of code that provides the "hooks" that let you connect SharePoint and the other application.

- As per the above, there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of coding to create the connections. Clearly a third party tool like Lightning Tools will be needed. I will go to their booth later and update my blog with their plans. UPDATE – Went to the Lightning Tools booth and they clarified that BCS will be supported with their graphical tools.

- Unlike the old BDC in 2007, you can create fully functional interfaces to other apps. For example we just saw a Word template use BDC data to populate company information in an invoice. You can also modify the look and feel of the SharePoint interface to make the data appear in a familiar interface for the user.

- Again, unlike the BDC (to the best of my knowledge anyway), you can update the source application data rather than just reading the data into SharePoint.

Unfortunately I had to leave the session a little early but this is generally the concept of how BCS works.

-Bill

While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, I went to a session on this mysterious thing I never heard of called Composites. Sadly I am not sure if Conposites are an actual set of capabilities on SharePoint or not. I will investigate further while I am here.

The key takeaway that was interesting had to do with how SharePoint is changing the game of software development. We learned of two case studies where two companies took very different paths in how they developed a custom in-house app to capture and define business requirements for their customers.

The first company built an in-house app based completely on ASP.net. All doc managemet, notifications, reports, etc were about 70% code and 30% SharePoint. Each of the 175 offices are expecting to pay 300k over 3-6 months to rollout.

The second company used base functionality of SharePoint as the starting point. End users defined the lists, documents, templates and workflows they wanted. Where there were gaps (data extraction/submittals) developers wrote SharePoint code to perform those activities. That code can be re-purposes for other business units. End result here was the application cost $300k to build and 25k-50k to rollout to 168 offices.

In conclusion, Microsoft is really trying to push developers to write re-usable components in SharePoint to add, augment or enhance features rather than trying to build something new altogether.

-Bill