Project Management - RSS Feeds

Monday, April 14, 2008

MS Project: The difference between Standard and Professional

What’s the difference between MS Project Standard and MS Project Professional? I get this question a lot when I teach MS Project classes.

Here’s Microsoft’s explanation:

Office Project Standard 2007 is the latest version of the desktop project management program. As a stand-alone product, Office Project Standard 2007 helps project managers, business managers, and planners to manage and plan projects independently with familiar, easy-to-use tools. Office Project Standard 2007 is not designed to exchange data with Office Project Server 2007.

Office Project Professional 2007 is the desktop client that is also used to connect with Office Project Server 2007 as part of the Office EPM Solution. Office Project Professional 2007 offers all the tools found in Office Project Standard 2007, and when used with Office Project Server 2007, it also provides powerful EPM capabilities such as collaboration, management of shared resources, portfolio management, and reporting across projects and programs run by different project managers.

So what does that mean? Standard and Professional are the same unless you are going to use Project Server. Professional is required for Project Server and will cost nearly double. Otherwise, save your organization money and get Standard (retail $599/$349 upgrade vs. $999/599 upgrade).

Of course, please bear in mind that you may have future needs for Project Server so if that’s the case, Project Professional should also be considered for your organization’s growth, even if you don’t need it today.

No comments: