Earlier this month our friends on the Office 365 team shared a link via Twitter to an article by technology writer Will Kelly . Entitled ” Microsoft Office 365 for Project Managers “, the article surfaced the project management potential in Office 365 and an interesting theme–the “democratization of project management data”. Read more about it here . Today, we’re excited to share a special series on how Office 365 adoption can transform your existing project management capabilities. Microsoft Office 365 provides an infrastructure for collaboration and information sharing. It offers a cloud solution for an organization of any size, whether that organization involves a small business or a small team with members spread across the globe. But best of all, it offers the ease and familiarity you’d expect from Microsoft and its Office products. Many enterprises have already had a great deal of success implementing a PPM solution via Project Server 2010. But how about options for smaller organizations or departments just getting started? Microsoft Project is perfect for helping project managers organize schedules and manage budget, resources and dependencies, but what about the rest of the team?  Effective project management begins with team collaboration.  It necessitates a secure and central location for all project documents and artifacts like a site provisioned in SharePoint Online, demands ease of mobile communication you’d find in Exchange Online and Lync Online,  and the great user experience provided by Microsoft Project and Office 2010 when working with project schedules and documents. By themselves, these tools are just tools, but together it opens the door to a unique collaboration experience that any organization can benefit from. And because we’ve built these products with the user in mind they just work, even across multiple platforms and devices.  We’ve called out a number of common pain points tied to project collaboration–document storage, effective communication, sharing a project schedule, and visual reporting for stakeholders just to name a few. But this represents a small sample of all the great possibilities Office 365 enables for project management and we’d love to hear more from users like you in the comments below or via Twitter and Facebook . Download the paper and accompanying video here. You can view the full video series on our YouTube channel as well. We’ll be featuring a great session  around this very topic this March at Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, AZ. Don’t forget to register!

The Guide to creating SharePoint Composites includes a 73-page download that explains SharePoint Composites. To quote from the download, “A SharePoint Composite combines data, documents, and business process in a useful, productive way. … A SharePoint Composite is a ‘do-it-yourself’ business solution.” The SharePoint Composites.docx handbook includes a detailed introduction along with common design patterns that can help provide ideas on how to integrate and present data for collaboration and BI, by using SharePoint. Although the Office 2010 integration points section includes only a brief mention of Microsoft Project, the handbook overall is a useful introduction to the concepts. For those who work with Project and Project Server, the handbook can help to expand your view of what is possible – as well as what is useful.  Similar terms you might have heard in the past include mashup and OBAs (Office Business Applications). The SharePoint Composites handbook extends those ideas specifically for SharePoint-based solutions.

We are pleased to announce out-of-the-box integration of Microsoft Project Professional 2010 with SharePoint Online in Office 365!  Extend the power of Project to your whole team—no matter their location! Project managers can collaborate with teams to share schedule details quickly with Project Professional 2010 and SharePoint® Online (Office 365) task list synchronization. Individuals throughout the organization can view the task list and quickly see task status and update progress in SharePoint Online—from virtually anywhere! Project managers can then easily synchronize and update the project plan from Project Professional 2010. Synchronization is bi-directional, providing greater flexibility for communicating with the team. Want to see how simple it is to keep your team in sync—from virtually anywhere? Learn more about Project Professional 2010 with SharePoint Online Learn more about Project Professional 2010 Learn more about Office 365 Try Project Professional 2010 Get the Office 365 Trial Read the related post Enabling Better Collaborative Project Management with Office 365 and Project Professional 2010.

I am excited to announce the release of SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 produced by Jornata . Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides a vast number of capabilities that empower both business users and IT to create solutions quickly. For this reason, many organizations consider implementing SharePoint as a central platform to address a wide array of business solutions. For those organizations, it is likely that they will need a good way to track, manage, and prioritize those business requests. The SharePoint Lifecycle Management Solution with Project Server 2010 provides a framework and guidance for managing SharePoint business requests and includes two white papers and a sample dataset. This no-code solution includes: Business Decision Maker/Technical Decision Maker white paper containing a business evaluation of how Microsoft Project Server 2010 can be employed to help manage your SharePoint Lifecycle through enhancement requests and project proposals. Technical white paper contains step-by-step instructions on how to install and customize the SharePoint Lifecycle Management solution, along with basic instructions on how to use it. Project Server 2010 sample databases and templates that can be used to illustrate concepts. The sample dataset requires a farm that has a working installation of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with Project Server 2010 fully configured (please refer to Project Server 2010 Tech Center ); and the Dynamic Workflow and Workflow Visualization web part solutions from Microsoft Project 2010 Solution Starters . For an overview of the solution, please watch this recent recording from Tech.Ed last week: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP202 Last but not least do not forget to check out other existing white papers on Microsoft Project Portfolio Management offering on our Project site at https://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/articles-white-papers.aspx Christophe Fiessinger Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Project https://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie

I am excited to announce the release of Microsoft Project for the masses , A Simplified, Scenario Driven Approach produced by Innovative-e.

. . . which is, after all, a SharePoint application. See the SharePoint and Silverlight Training Course . It includes 30 hands-on labs, including labs on accessing data through WCF services.

MS Press has just published Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010 , which will also be very useful for Project Server 2010 developers – since, as we all know, Project Server is an application service in SharePoint Server, PWA is a SharePoint application (a somewhat restricted one with a few specialized Project Server Web Parts thrown in), and project sites are pure SharePoint (with some custom lists). Although Chapter 11 on Creating and Developing Workflows primarily discusses SharePoint Designer, which we can’t use for Project Server workflows, it does provide a good overview of workflow concepts.

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The Object Link Provider (OLP) in Project Server 2010 enables the management of the Project-specific lists in a project site (issues, risks, deliverables, documents, and custom lists) and integration of the SharePoint lists with Project Server. The OLP

A new feature in SharePoint 2010, Resource Throttling can help keep your servers running smoothly, even during peak hours. Learn how to configure Resource Throttling . Follow our daily tips: • facebook.com/TechNetTips • twitter.com/TechNetTips • blogs.technet.com/tnmag