Hi, my name is Matt, I’m a PM on the Project team and I’m here to talk with you a bit about the improvements that we’ve made to the timesheet experience in the new version of Project Web App. Over the course of the next couple posts I’ll talk about improvements targeted at both end-users, backend administrators, and developers that streamline the timesheet process and provide increased functionality to make you more effective.

In my first post I’d like to chat about the improvements that we’ve made for end-users, the people who actually have to fill out their time card every week or so. Here on the product team we realize that one of the most tedious, and yet common, tasks that many users have to complete using Project Web App (PWA) is filling out their time card. To help ease the pain and make it faster for you to get back to your actual work we’ve made several improvements to the experience in PWA 2013.

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Project Professional and Project Web App now allow you to instant message, voice or video call, or send email with one click using Lync in the most common views. This makes getting quick answers from your team members, fellow PMs, or other stakeholders easier than ever.

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So is Microsoft Project! While at the PMI conference make sure to come by the Microsoft Project booth and say hi. We’ll be at booth #501. Stop by and get your Project questions answered and see demos of the next version of Project . Additionally, you can enter to win an Xbox Kinect along with a copy of Project. Speaking of the next version of Project, we’ll be demoing it at the product theater in the exhibit hall Monday and Tuesday from 1:15pm-1:45pm. Hope to see you there!

That’s right, today the Project engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of the new Project. We wanted to share this very exciting news with you before we went off to celebrate. We are very excited about the new version of Project. For the first time, Project offers flexible online and on-premises solutions for project portfolio management (PPM) and everyday work, enabling organizations to effectively execute and achieve strategic priorities. Volume Licensing customers...

We are happy to share the new Microsoft Project sessions at SharePoint Conference 2012 November 12-15, 2012 in Las Vegas. We have put together an amazing lineup of sessions and product experts such as MVPs and Program Managers from Microsoft to tell & demonstrate the new Project story. In addition to great sessions we will also have hands-on-labs, a product booth, and a FREE readiness pre-event: The Best of the New Project Ignite . Don’t miss #SPC12, REGISTER today , and see you next month in...

To quote John Randolph, “Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions”. Good news, in the new version of Project we gave you more time, 100 more years to be exact. For those of you doing really long-term planning, you may have noticed that the max date in Project was December 31, 2049. With the new Project we have moved this max date to December 31, 2149 . Project Client: Project Web App: Now you can go crazy planning out your future: If you are using...

While Internet Explorer continues to be a fantastic browser to view and interact with the web, we wanted to make sure that our users can access Project Web App from the wide range of browsers available in the market today. So, we heavily invested in expanding our browser support in the new version of Project to match the same set of browsers and devices that SharePoint supports. Now Project users can open PWA pages in any of the following browsers and platforms: · Windows 8: Internet Explorer...

As your projects grow in complexity and in length, it is easy to lose sight of how all of your tasks fit together. Project 2010 and earlier allow you to highlight and filter down to the critical path of your project, which is a great way to see which tasks affect your project’s finish date. Many times, the project finish date doesn’t tell you the full story though. For example, let’s say that you are managing a construction project, and your favorite contractor suddenly announces he is retiring at the end of the month. You check your project plan, and you see that you were expecting him two weeks after this deadline. However, the list of predecessors that are driving his tasks is daunting.

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In project management, a project life cycle can be a long-running process that spans several phases. For instance, new R&D projects need to go through several phases, including creating the proposals, selecting a subset of them, planning, assigning resources, and finally managing and executing the approved projects. In general, managing any work request, whether it’s a new idea, or an IT change request, would have to go through several phases until its completion.

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If you live in Outlook, or when connecting to your Project Site is impossible, it is good to have your assignments and tasks in Exchange so you can see and edit them via your favorite Exchange client – Outlook, Outlook Web App, or your mobile phone, even when you are offline. SharePoint 2013 introduces a new feature called My Tasks which aggregates all the tasks assigned to you in SharePoint, Outlook and Project into one experience. You can learn more about that here . With Exchange integration...