Enabling Better Collaborative Project Management with Office 365 and Project Professional 2010

Today, Kurt DelBene announced Office 365, which we believe will define the future of productivity. Office 365 is a new cloud service that brings enterprise-grade productivity to everyone. This is an important announcement for the industry and Microsoft. I encourage you to watch today’s global press conference about Office 365 on the Microsoft News Center (www.microsoft.com/presspass).

I wanted to blog about this news to explain what it means for Microsoft Project 2010. As many of you know, we offer Project Server 2010 cloud hosting through numerous partners that many customers are already taking advantage of today. With SharePoint Online as part of Office 365, we now deliver great collaborative project management in the cloud through the Project Professional synchronization to SharePoint just as we do today for our on-premise customers.

		SharePoint Online as part of Office 365

The Project Professional 2010 ability to publish plans to SharePoint allows project teams to share and update Project tasks through SharePoint lists. Project plans can be easily updated by team members and quickly communicated to executive stakeholders.

Highlighted features of Project Professional synchronization to SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 include:

• Publishing your Microsoft Project Professional 2010 project plans to SharePoint task lists in Office 365 allows team members to view and update task status. This allows project managers to then automatically synchronize updates directly into the Project Professional project plan. Project managers also have the choice to extend the number of additional fields to synchronize between SharePoint and Project.
• The synchronization feature will help resolve any conflicts in task information that are identified during workspace synchronization.
• SharePoint task lists in Office 365 can be converted to Project Professional 2010 project plans.

For a demo of the Project Professional 2010 collaborative capability see Microsoft Project Professional 2010 SharePoint Synchronization

For more details on Microsoft Project Professional 2010 see Microsoft Project Professional 2010

Download a free trial of Microsoft Project Professional 2010 at Download Center Microsoft Project Professional 2010

Arpan Shah
Director, Microsoft Project
http//blogs.msdn.com/arpans