Announcing a New Vision for Microsoft Project
Microsoft just announced that they have a new vision for modern work management. The new vision begins with Project Home, which is a new service that allows you to view and manage all of your projects in one place.
From Home, you can create new projects easily using the new project management service. This new service has been designed to support any role, project type, and skill level. New Project services are born in the cloud, which allows teams to access all of the same data. The capabilities of these new services encompass everything from resource and financial management to time and expense tracking. Future releases will allow customers the ability to connect the complete power of the Project desktop app to the service.
Roadmap, another new service being released, will give you a big picture view of all work in progress, regardless of whether your teams are using Microsoft Project or Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS). In Roadmap, you can create timeline views of multiple different projects so that all work is visible. For future releases, the support for Planner and other third-party services such as Jira will be added so that Project can become your one-stop-shop to manage work across your organization. Roadmap is the first capability of Portfolio, which is a set of program and portfolio management services that is designed to be intuitive, visual, and easy to use.
All three new services have adopted the Microsoft Common Data Service (CDS) for Apps as the new vehicle for Project. Together with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, CDS for Apps delivers more power in terms of scalability, performance, and with the highest levels of compliance and security.
So what’s next? These new services will be introduced as a series of releases. Home is generally available today. The first release of Roadmap will be available early next year and the first release of the new project management service will be available in the first half of next year. All three services are going to be packaged as part of the Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions. Current subscribers will be able to use the new capabilities at no additional cost. As for existing Project Online users, they can continue to use that with confidence, but the new services will become Microsoft’s primary project management service slowly over time.
