Microsoft Office Project

Microsoft Office Project (aka Microsoft Project or MSP) is Microsoft’s desktop project management scheduling application. It comes in Standard and Professional editions. The Professional edition includes collaborative enterprise project management capabilities when used with Microsoft Office Project Server.

Project’s strength is the ability to allow users to quickly start building project schedules. Users can develop a project outline/task list, schedule the tasks in the Gantt view and assign resources.

This strength is a double edged sword in some circumstances though where a more structured approach to developing and maintaining schedules is required. Project allows all kinds of inconsistencies in schedules that more rigorous tools highlight for the user.

The ease of getting started also belies the complexity of the tool. It includes many high-end scheduling capabilities.

Microsoft Project does not support multiple users working on a single project at the same time. The default storage approach is the MPP file format. However, other formats and databases are supported via ODBC.

There are many add-in tools from Microsoft and other vendors that expand on the capabilities of Microsoft Project.

Microsoft Project Professional is also a client for the Microsoft Office Project Server application.