Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Every year, project management gets more complex, as projects increasingly cross functional and even organizational boundaries. In response, Microsoft has broadened Microsoft Project￯﾿ﾽs reach in planning and managing these ￯﾿ﾽnext-gen￯﾿ﾽ projects. Project 2003 is a stunningly powerful tool -- and a very complex one. Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out gives you all the information you need to make the most of Project 2003 -- from quick, step-by-step feature instructions, to expert guidance for the whole project lifecycle.

Author Teresa Stover is a longtime project manager, a consultant to the Project development team...and an exceptional writer. In this nearly 1,100-page book, she systematically covers both the standalone Microsoft Project Standard 2003 and the enterprise-focused Microsoft Project Professional 2003. She also offers detailed coverage of collaborative project management with Microsoft Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Project Web Access 2003.

Stover begins with a detailed introduction to the art of project management itself: creating project plans and controlling projects using your plan as a roadmap. Even if you￯﾿ﾽre an experienced project manager, you￯﾿ﾽll appreciate her discussion of integrating Microsoft Project into your workflow, and how stakeholders can interact with Project or use its outputs.

She then covers the meat-and-potatoes tasks every PM will perform: entering and organizing tasks and resources; viewing project status; incorporating costs and reviewing budgets; and refining projects to adjust critical paths, resource workloads, and key dates.

Speaking of dates, there￯﾿ﾽs detailed coverage of scheduling: setting (and reality-checking) task durations; establishing task dependencies; working with flexible and inflexible constraints; adding lead time; setting milestones; and so forth.

Once you￯﾿ﾽve done all that, you￯﾿ﾽll learn how to track your project￯﾿ﾽs progress -- and adjust your finely honed plan for the realities of Planet Earth.

Throughout Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out, you￯﾿ﾽll find thorough introductions to Project 2003￯﾿ﾽs significant new features. For instance, Stover explains soft-booking, which lets you tentatively propose the use of specific resources, pending feedback. She also introduces timesheet lockdowns, which prevent team members from reporting hours for time periods outside those you￯﾿ﾽve authorized.

Microsoft has extended its features for enterprise collaboration, and Stover covers the new tools in extraordinary depth. (That￯﾿ﾽs the biggest reason this book is nearly 150 pages longer than its predecessor.)

Most notably, there are two chapters on Project Web Access, Microsoft￯﾿ﾽs web-based project portal. PWA helps dispersed project teams to work on projects without having to use Microsoft Project Professional, itself. It also gives executives an easy tool for making key project decisions -- and seeing that they￯﾿ﾽre carried out.

Finally, you￯﾿ﾽll appreciate the CD-ROM￯﾿ﾽs extensive collection of Microsoft and third-party tools and add-ins; and the complete e-Book that allows you to take Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out anywhere your notebook PC can go -- all the way up to the executive suite. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dig into Project 2003-and discover how you can really put your project management skills to work! This supremely organized reference packs all the information you need to master every major tool, task, and enhancement in Project 2003-without the fluff. You'll ace the essentials-from defining project scope to analyzing and reporting results. Learn how to orchestrate tasks, resources, time, and costs; manage multiple projects and subprojects; track and report progress; facilitate team collaboration through Microsoft SharePoint™ Team Services; and build custom solutions with macros and Microsoft Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA). Quickly advance your expertise with new Project features and capabilities for project setup, reporting, earned-value analysis, database support, and more. You'll gain hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and handy workarounds in concise, fast-answer format. On the companion CD you get an eBook of Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out. You also get additional documents from the author, a collection of Microsoft resources for learning about Project, a catalog of 3rd-party Project resources, and two additional e-books: the Microsoft Computer Dictionary, Fifth Edition, and the Insider's Guide to Microsoft Office OneNote 2003. You also get a 60-day trial version of Project Standard 2003. With INSIDE OUT, you'll discover the best and fastest ways to perform everyday tasks-and challenge yourself to new levels of Project mastery!

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