SharePoint for Project Management

Chapter 8. Integrating PM Tools

Don’t reinvent the wheel, just realign it.

—Anthony J. D’Angelo, writer

As project managers in the 21st century, when most of us have a BlackBerry smartphone, drive with a GPS-enabled car, use TiVo to record our favorite shows, and carry Macs as our notebooks of choice, you would think we would be as sophisticated in leveraging the latest and greatest tools to support us in managing projects. Guess again.

In my experience, most project managers and project teams rely on Microsoft Word, Excel, Project, and even PowerPoint as project management tools. The good news is that you don’t have to give these tools up! You can continue to reap the benefits of using these tools on your projects and complement their use with your SharePoint PMIS.

So far, you have learned to leverage SharePoint’s document management capabilities and to customize access to the documents created with these project management tools. This chapter focuses on maximizing your use of Microsoft Project and Excel with SharePoint.

Dux Quax: The Infamous Microsoft Project

Forgive me, but let me stand on my soapbox. I need to get this off my chest. First of all, Microsoft Project is a great tool that assists in generating a project schedule, a resource management plan, and a basic project budget. However, it does not generate the entire project plan. A project plan is made up of a lot more than just what Microsoft Project generates. Minimally, a project plan is made up of various subsidiary plans, ...