Introduction

Effective tracking and management of projects is necessary to achieve your project goals. Microsoft Office Project 2007 provides enhanced tools to help you track and control project work, schedules, and finances. You can also integrate Project 2007 tools with Microsoft Office applications.
Features of Project 2007

Project 2007 provides various features that help your organization gain better control and visibility across all projects. This leads to an enhanced.

decision-making process and an improved alignment with business strategies. This, in turn, increases operational efficiency. Project 2007 helps you plan work and manage resources effectively. It also enables efficient communication and collaboration. In addition, it helps leverage existing data and provides quick access to information.

Effective Work Planning

Project 2007 helps you efficiently plan work ranging from small projects to large-scale operations. You can use Project 2007 to plan schedules, allocate resources, manage budgets, and set realistic expectations for your team, management, and customers. You can easily track data and estimates such as percent complete, budget versus actual cost, and earned value by using a set of predefined metrics.

Besides tracking data, Project 2007 enables you to track project performance during the entire duration of the project. It also enables you to save project snapshots in baselines and track project progress. For a quick understanding of the project management process, Project 2007 provides an interactive Microsoft Project Guide with step-by-step help. In addition, it provides intuitive toolbars and menus that help you learn project management fundamentals.
Effective Resource Management

You can use Project 2007 to mange your resources, so that the organization can achieve its long-term goals. An inaccurate estimation of long-term workloads and capacity can result in unplanned recruitment and quick lay-off cycles, knowledge loss, higher overhead, and low employee morale. Project 2007 provides visibility in work transactions, timesheets, and resource capabilities. You can build resource plans to coordinate the recruiting and outsourcing strategies with long-term business objectives.

Project 2007 enables you to assign resources to tasks and manage conflicts over allocated assignments easily. You can allocate work to the entire team collectively instead of assigning work to individual resources. Team members can accept their individual assignments and indicate the time taken against the allocated assignment.
Efficient Communication and Collaboration

You can use Project 2007 to efficiently communicate and collaborate with project teams. With the growing geographical and cultural diversity in organizations, it is important to promote teamwork and maintain a common goal. Project 2007 allows knowledge sharing across teams and helps them work in collaboration for achieving project goals. Project 2007 is adaptable and accommodates quick adjustment in activities in case of updates.

Project 2007 also enables you to use different formats for presenting information. In Project 2007, you can format project data and present it in the form of reports, charts, PDF documents, and one-page printable schedules. To create reports, you can use ready-to-use report templates present in Project 2007. You can also create your own templates and share them with other users.
Quick Access to Information

With Project 2007, you can access information easily and quickly. In Project 2007, consolidating data is simple and time saving because you can group data by any predefined or custom fields. This ensures quick information retrieval when required. Moreover, in Project 2007, you can track changes in various versions of a project easily. This helps track the scope and schedule changes.

You can customize Project 2007 according to the specifications of your project. You can also select custom display fields and modify toolbars, formulas, graphical indicators, and reports. In addition, you can efficiently export data from Project 2007 to Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint by using the Copy Picture to Office Wizard.
Effective Leveraging of Existing Data

Project 2007 enables quick leveraging of data across different platforms. With its built-in integration with Office 2007, Project 2007 allows users to work with the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution when working with Office Outlook or Office SharePoint. In addition, Project 2007 is integrated with other Office applications. This helps convert the existing task lists in Office Excel and Office Outlook into ready-to-use project plans with minimum efforts.

Project 2007 also enables you to add resources to projects from Microsoft Active Directory or from a Microsoft Exchange Server address book.