TeamDirection Project for SharePoint brings the SharePoint Document Workspace experience
to a basic project management application. SharePoint Document Workspaces are perhaps
one of the lesser-known features of Office 2003. When you set up a Document Workspace,
you hook up a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to a dedicated SharePoint subsite.
The document gets a special task pane to manage collaborative tasks such as instant
messaging with co-authors, task management, link management, and so on, and you
can use the subsite for anything that SharePoint itself is capable of - here's a
Microsoft page showing off how it works. It's all pretty nicely integrated
and spiffy.
When you launch TeamDirection Project for SharePoint, you get a Project Organizer
window listing all of your active projects and offering options such as creating,
deleting, importing, exporting, and synchronizing projects (in addition to SharePoint
synchronization, it offers two-way import/export with Microsoft Project files).
To get started, create a new project or import an existing Microsoft Project file.
From here, if you've worked with Project, or any other Gantt chart oriented product,
you'll be on familiar ground, creating tasks, assigning durations, and linking them
together. Then a simple wizard will let you share the project on SharePoint, choosing
other members of your organization to be part of the site. You can then assign those
members as resources to tasks, as well as collaborating with them through SharePoint.
Any member can update the project plan, of course, and you can set up automatic
or manual synchronization between copies. TeamDirection projects have a task pane
that functions pretty much like the one in Office documents, so if you've used Document
Workspaces before you'll feel right at home. And of course you can always drop into
the SharePoint backend to perform other collaborative work beyond that which the
task pane enables if you so desire.
The project management application itself is fairly simple, managing tasks, times,
resources, and costs, and showing time and cost rollups. You won't find the sort
of fancy bells and whistles here that you get from Microsoft Project or other applications
aimed at the professional project manager - not even resource leveling. But the
ability to round-trip to Project makes up for that to some extent. Where I see this
fitting in is to fill a niche in organizations that already manage everything at
the departmental level via SharePoint. If you're one of them, you've probably already
experimented with trying to use Excel to maintain a project plan, simply because
Excel is a better fit for SharePoint than Project is. In that case, TeamDirection
is a much better fit: the SharePoint integration is superb, and it does exactly
what it's supposed to. For a small group focusing on a resonably-sized project that
doesn't need high-end PM tools, this looks like an excellent fit. You can download
a 15-day trial to try it out yourself.