Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is their collaborative project management software as a service which you can try before you buy as long as you sign up with an authentic business email and cel phone as they will verify your identity prior to allowing your access. The software works from the cloud and in that is easy to access from any of my devices. I have already been an Office 365 subscriber for several months and am now considering my options in terms of addition software. In particular I'm interested in learning how this software stacks up against Slack which to me is a very cool tool that is similar and free for small teams. With you Microsoft Project you can plan projects very easily and share them as well. You can keep project quite organized as it is relatively user friendly and straightforward to learn and to use. If you're familiar with Microsoft's other products already like Word, Powerpoint, Excel and so on you'll find a familiarity in the dashboard. You can also prioritize your projects and access them from anywhere such as your mobile phone, tablet, laptop or computer. The timeline that allows you to give presentations which are visual and effective and you can import any of there other file types like .ppt, .doc and so on. While I like the team planning module as well for it's help anticipating issues down the road based on selected criteria. I like that you can develop rather complex projects with a lot of functionality that's easy to use. You can work with multiple groups and action items using the flexible project components to get it done and that's great. I also like your ability to nest tasks in levels and assign resources to tasks. I like that there the calendar view is quite visual and helps you makes connections between dependencies and sequences in your project plan. I've seen much more complicated project management tools which don't have this much flexibility in terms of creating complex, efficient workflows.

If you haven't had experience using Microsoft Office products in the past there will be a learning curve in order to become proficient with Project and use it to it's full potential and scale. It's quite an advanced project manager. But can become relatively intuitive quickly once you learn one Microsoft tool it's much easier to use them all. It would be cool if there were pre-made project setups for particular niches or industries where the entire account was setup up with niche specific product templates and business intelligence. It would be cool if you could assign project tasks and link them directly to tasks in outlook. I understand there are more expensive project management tools on the market I am surprised this tool is as expensive as it is though I do realize it's value there's usually this much value for less money offered by Microsoft in my opinion, relatively speaking in general compared to their Office 365 and Skype for Business cloud based products.

There's a free trial available for you to check it out prior to investing which I can appreciate. That's what I've done and find my self still on the fence after spending time with it. It's certainly quite advanced and I personally find it quite user friendly and easy to use based on my technical experience and time with their other products. Yet I'm not certain the ROI is quite there because if I want something this advanced it would likely be for developing software and would likely use GitHub. Though if you're already using Microsoft tools exclusively or heavily in your business and have complicated projects to plan and map out than this very well could be a solid project management system for you.