I just returned from the Project Conference held in Seattle last week.  Microsoft put on a great event that was filled with very informative information on the next release of the product.  Please keep an eye on the BLOG as I will be posting more specifics over the coming months.

First, Project “12“ will be released in the so-called Office “12“ wave, meaning Office and Project are included in the same marketing blitz we should expect toward the end of this year.  Another key element, which will be released at the same time is SharePoint “v3“, along with the Windows Workflow Foundation.

Here are the Top 10 New Features for Project “12“:

  1. Client - Project Professional has some nice scheduling enhancements, but the client will remain mostly the same as Project 2003.
  2. Performance - A new 'caching' engine will allow the P12 client (Project Professional) and the server to share only differences in changes to a schedule, which should mean a drastic performance improvement when opening/saving projects.
  3. SharePoint - Project Web Access (PWA) will be completely based on SharePoint.  Anytime you access PWA, you are basically accessing a SharePoint site.
  4. Best-met Expectation - There is now a server-side scheduling engine.  This is not a feature-complete engine, but will allow you to do things like create small project schedules on the web, publish project updates without the client and even update the schedule based on timesheet entries without the client.
  5. Database - For those of you familiar with the current version of Project 2003, you are basically working with one database, with the option to split out the “views“ tables.  Now, there are four distinct databases (not including SharePoint).  These are:
    • Published (for the most up-to-date version of your project)
    • Draft (for making updates to your plan before 'publishing' them)
    • Archive (for keeping backups of schedules)
    • Reporting (a 'flattened' database that makes it real easy to build reports from the Project Server database)
    • Note: There is still an OLAP cube, it is still built in a scheduled fashion and it will add many of the fields and data elements that currently require you to write custom code to add to the cube.
  6. Developer - If you are a developer, say “goodbye“ to the PDS and say “Hello“ to the PSI.  This is a full-featured, typed, API for Project Server.  Microsoft claims they will not publically publish the database schema for the Project Server database because the PSI will [hopefully] perform all the functions you may need it to.  There is no migration path for PDS calls, so if you use PDS or even write datbase-direct calls to do customizations now, then chances are, you will need to re-write this code.
  7. Integration - Expect lots of integration tools for external financial applications, including Microsoft Dynamcs and SAP.
  8. Timesheets - Will be somewhat (not sure of the official story on this one yet) de-coupled from the Project schedule.  This is a good thing, because there are too many scenarios for timesheets whereby you may want timesheets de-coupled from the plan, but still allow you to track actuals and perform reporting on utilization.
  9. Platform Support - P12 was built for, and has had more testing time on, SQL Server 2000 and Analysis Services 2000.  SQL Server 2005 will be a supported platform and Microsoft has built-in some “value added“ features when you use the SQL 2005 platform.
  10. Reporting - With the new Reporting database and SQL Analysis Services 2005 (if you use it), there are going to be many options to build your own reports.  Microsoft clearly is leaning toward opening up the data so you can build more of your own, as opposed to relying on their farily basic “views“.  Plan on using SQL Reporting Services, Business Scorecard Manager and Excel Server as your base reporting platform.

-Bill