Sneak Peek: New & Improved Microsoft Project Add-In for PM Central

SharePoint is a great tool for project management and collaboration, and its ability to display tasks, schedules, and dependencies is important and useful across entire organizations. However, as project managers, we tend to fall back to the usage of Microsoft Project to map out our schedules and resource assignments. PM Central has been equipped with a Microsoft Project Add-In for some time now, but over time and through feedback from our customers, we have improved and added more and more functions to the application. In the upcoming 3.5 release of PM Central for SharePoint 2010, our focus has been improving our Microsoft Project Add-In even further by allowing users from Microsoft Project Add-In to connect to their PM Central project site in SharePoint 2010, and either create a new project in Microsoft Project, merge data, or append data:

Merge

For example, you have a schedule with 20 tasks that you brought into the PM Central site earlier. The next day, talking with the team, you identify 20 more task items and resource assignments, and you want to update your schedule in SharePoint. You don't want to have to delete the existing tasks and import again, or manually add these 20 new tasks. With the Microsoft Project Add-In in R3.5, you can connect, select merge, and synchronize your schedule, after which PM Central will have updated with the (now) 40 tasks.

Append

For example, you have a schedule with 20 tasks that you brought in to the PM Central site earlier. You're collaborating with another PM and s/he provides you another .mpp file that has 50 additional tasks. You want to incorporate these additional tasks into the project. Using the Microsoft Project Add-In in R3.5, you can connect, select append, and synchronize your tasks.  Having done so, PM Central will append the other PM's .mpp file to the existing tasks, and all 70 tasks will be updated in your PM Central site.

The Microsoft Project Add-In also has additional functions such as detecting differences in the working hours settings between your .mpp file and those in your PM Central site, and will notify you to make the necessary changes to settings prior to completing your merge or append action:

PM Central R3.5 with new and improved Microsoft Project Add-In is scheduled to be released in June. Want to be among the first to know when it's released?  You can sign up to get alerts when the new version will be available on our storefront site.