Following last month’s announcement: The New Microsoft Project reaches RTM! , you can now download the following trials for the following languages: Arabic, English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portugese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish: Microsoft Project Professional 2013 Microsoft Project Server 2013 Additional downloads: Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 Microsoft SharePoint 2013

Ludovic Hauduc, General Manager of Microsoft Project

Last week Microsoft announced availability of the Office Customer Preview for public download. And right alongside it, we released a preview of the new Microsoft Project with two options to try out the latest release for yourself. I'm proud of the work the team has put into this release and today, I'm also excited to finally share the new Project with all of you.

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Is it challenging to get an up-to-date view of all the projects in your team? Do you want to make sure everyone is focused on the right priorities? Do you manage a large portfolio of projects and want to roll out a structured governance process? Are you a Project Manager who always wants to use the latest version of Project Professional?

As announced on Monday (The New Microsoft Project), Project Online has been designed for you! The service provides the following key capabilities:

· The New SharePoint – Project Online is fully integrated with the New SharePoint, and offers all its benefits, including a clean user experience, pervasive social networking, simple task management capabilities on any team site and a personal view of all your SharePoint and Outlook tasks in one place.

· Project Web App (PWA) – Project Online includes PWA, a web-based Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution that helps you select the right projects that align to your business goals, manage your team’s workload, track time spent on projects and get insights through powerful business intelligence tools.

· Project Pro for Office 365 – Project Online offers anytime, anywhere access to Project Professional via application streaming.

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Whenever we talk to project managers, we hear one word over and over – reports. How you’re always preparing reports for status presentation or mails to customers, management, team members, etc. How you have to make quick decisions and need reports to help you do this. All of that feedback inspired us to build a new reporting feature in the new version of Project.

Building off of a familiar Office infrastructure, you can now create reports with charts and tables in Project off your project’s data to analyze your project and then share the results with others. The reports update automatically as you update your project. To help you get started, we’ve even included a bunch of reports out of box.

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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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We're proud to announce the availability of Microsoft Project as a flexible cloud service, delivered by Office 365. For the first time, customers can sign up for flexible plans, get started quickly and use the full capabilities of project and portfolio management without adding IT complexity. Read on to learn about the 3 Project cloud services: Project Online, Project Pro for Office 365, and Project Online with Project Pro for Office 365.

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Project Web App (PWA) makes it easier than ever to start getting value quickly. Your Project Web App home page comes complete with a succinct, interactive, visual-based guide to help configurers and end-users hit the ground running. Those configuring can immediately learn how to get create or import projects, setup enterprise reports, share with colleagues, install apps, and more. End-users can easily access projects and reports while getting important notifications about task-related updates.

The Project Web App home page can also be customized to meet your organization’s individual needs. Add or subtract some of the “Track your work” tiles. Provide welcome text and valuable links to resources. Create your own carousel (Promoted Links app) with content specific to your operation. Making the home page “yours” is easier than ever.

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Almost any project we work on is collaborative these days.  A restaurateur might be working with his staff and publicists to develop and advertise a new menu.  A wedding planner might be working with florists and venue coordinators to make someone’s dream wedding come true.  You need a way to coordinate to-dos, easily communicate status, and stay in sync with your team without leaving your favorite tools.

In the next version of SharePoint, you can add task management capabilities to enhance any team site so you can get organized, plan and track tasks, and communicate deadlines, all in the same place you store documents and notes.

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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...

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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