Microsoft Project Server Reviews

We are using it for building Research and Development Project labs.

It has been helpful for calculating the time of completion of our projects and looking at the critical parts of our projects.

The ability to look at resource loading is most valuable.

Collaboration within the tool is lacking when you compare it to online or cloud-based tools.

We should be able to notify assignees about the tasks that have been assigned to them. This is something that we don't have, and it could be because of the way it was deployed for us.

I have been using this solution for about five years.

It is pretty stable.

It seems scalable to me.

I don't have any experience with them.

It was our company's decision to switch to this. With my previous employer, I have used different solutions. Smartsheet is one of them.

I did not deploy it myself. I am an end-user. We have an IT organization for its deployment.

You have to define your use case and see if this tool makes sense for your use case or not. 

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

My clients are mostly using Microsoft Project Server for infrastructure-type projects management as a scheduling tool.

Microsoft Project Server helps organizations in collaboration.

The scheduling tool is useful.

I have been using Microsoft Project Server for a number of years.

The solution is stable.

I have found the scalability of the Microsoft Project Server to be good.

We have approximately 10 to 20 uses using this solution in my organization and we plan to increase usage. We do consult for clients and we are always looking for more business.

The technical support is good.

We previously used Oracle Primavera.

The initial setup was complex.

We used consultants for the implementation of the solution.

We have approximately two people that do the maintenance and support of the solution.

I have seen a return on investment from the use of this solution, it has been good.

The price of the Microsoft Project Server could improve, it is expensive here in Africa. When comparing Microsoft Project Server to Oracle Primavera for us, Microsoft Project Server is quite cost-effective.

I noticed recently there are lots of new solutions coming out, but I don't know if they offer solutions that are more for agile product management. This would be a benefit if there were.

I rate Microsoft Project Server an eight out of ten.

We are currently using the 2001 version. 

We use the solution for projects, with the goal of it being shared with more users, who can employ it as a single tool. 

The solution could have more compact dashboards, such as one finds with Planview. 

We have been using Microsoft Project Server for 20 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

I cannot comment on the technical support as I was not directly aligned with it. 

I cannot comment on the price as I was not responsible for purchasing the solution. 

The solution is easy to use. My advice is that one first try it out, guage its look and feel. 

I rate Microsoft Project Server as an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for the management of projects.

Microsoft Project Server is easy to use compared to other similar solutions, such as Primavera. It functions similar to Excel or others Microsoft solutions which makes it simple for most people to be able to use right away.

This solution could improve by adding integration with Primavera schedules to allow the reading and management of them.

In an upcoming release, the loading of larger schedules could be faster when using the wizard and better workload assigning is needed. For example, if work is assigned to someone and they only work at the beginning and the end but not in the middle, it splits the tasks equally over the period.

I have been using this solution for approximately six months.

The solution is stable for small projects but when used for larger projects it can become heavy and slow to load and operate.

We have approximately 900 employees with a license using this solution.

We still use Primavera and it is better at managing large projects than Microsoft Project Server. Additionally, we have used Microsoft Project Desktop and Excel for project management. It was not ideal because we were using Excel for reporting and people were able to cheat on their reports. With this solution, it is more difficult to alter the information to cheat the system.

The full installation with configurations took approximately two months.

We did the implementation ourselves.

There is an annual license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, it does not fit all use cases.

I rate Microsoft Project Server a seven out of ten.

My organization handles IT consulting and services. That's primarily how the organization is managed. The use case for this solution was to set up the resource development unit and manage the investment cost, scheduling, budgeting, and some of those new initiatives that were supposed to happen in the R&D division. That was why we were looking for a portfolio management product. We found that Project Server could be a way to visualize and govern the entire program for the client.

The solution has improved the organization primarily due to the transparency between each individual team. There is a productivity benefit. I've likely seen a 20% to 28% increase in productivity benefit over a year's time. From a cost perspective, I'm less sure of how to comment. That said, productivity and transparency are definitely the two benefits I've witnessed so far.

The most relevant feature is its collaboration capabilities. Users can easily collaborate, for example, on Sharepoint or Microsoft Teams. If there is a lot of heavy usage of Microsoft tools, it's easy to share and collaborate across apps.

The Excel interface is very good. 

The stability of the 2019 version is quite good.

The deployment aspect of the product is a bit tedious. That's something I personally see of my organization. Deploying Project Server from an infrastructure perspective is not an easy thing. It takes a week sometimes to set it up. 

From a features perspective, the insights around the cost and budget could be improved. Competitor products are more robust. Project Server has a very limited feature in terms of reporting. Specifically, the features around the cost control are weak. The built-in reports and the built-in analytics for Project Server are very minimal. The competitors are way ahead than what Project Server is offering us.

The initial setup was complex.

The integration to an employee engagement platform probably would make more sense and integrations with other products like SAP would be useful.

Users of Project Server need to write some amount of custom integrations to the DLP product innovation site. If you wanted to have resource analysis, you want to create invoices based on resources working on a project, that integration is still not there. Integrating with some of those invoice management systems would make more sense now based on the way enterprises are working in terms of automation.

The solution needs multi-language support. The tool primarily supports English as a primary language. If someone wanted to make it Arabic, the Project Server does not work well. The characters sets, the dates, and other things create a lot of mess.

We've been using the solution for around six years or so. We started using it in 2016.

When I was using the Project Server 2016, that was creating a lot of problems in terms of performance, in terms of export, input, the content. However, when we moved to Project Server 2019 three years ago, I would say it was an improved version. It's quite stable now. There have been a lot of technical advancements, and feature announcements. 2019 is a much more stable version.

Primarily the solution has been handled by the PMO team which is comprised of 20 users. They are mostly portfolio managers, program managers, and solution architects as well as an executive who usually uses it from a governance perspective.

Since this has been used by the portfolio managers, so it's basically bread and butter for the PMO team. It's used day in, day out and it's tracking a single source of truth from a program management perspective. In terms of expanding the portfolio, likely, the business will grow, and that's when we may add more users. By 2022, we might add five more users. That is what I foresee.

We go through a CSP partner for Microsoft due to the online nature of the deployment. Our CSP partner is quite helpful. We are pleased with the support quality they provide. I would rate them four out of five stars. 

The initial setup was complex. Any type of guidance or user training or helpful documentation and materials were not available.

The deployment took around seven to ten days. Deployment took really a long time. 

I will not be able to properly quantify what went wrong. I'm not sure if it was the infrastructure or the capacity planning or if the partner just wasn't quite capable. There could have been multiple issues. The general perception was that was supposed to happen within a day, maximum. It took around seven to nine all working days to just set up the environment.

We used partners. They were a Microsoft partner.

Since I was not managing the process, I can't give feedback in terms of how the partner was to work with, or their capabilities. 

The solution offers a subscription-based pay-as-you-go model.

Now that everyone has moved to the online version, it is my understanding that the approximate cost comes to around $350 to $400 USD per month. I see or close to $4,000 to $5,000 USD per annum.

We are simply a customer and an end-user.

Although we began with the on-premises version, we've recently started using the online version of the solution. That is primarily how we access it now.

From an advice perspective, for any enterprise that has an existing investment around Microsoft, it makes more sense in terms of moving to a Project Server to manage in a more structured way. However, if you do not use SharePoint, if you do not use Microsoft Teams or any sort of solution that is the real value of Project Server it's not necessary to use Project Server. This solution is best for those companies planning to have a commitment to Microsoft technology. It brings more value. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's lacking some features around budget cost and portfolio management. There are a few areas that could use improvement still. 

We primarily use the solution based on its mobility. I can use it online or via mobile phones or anywhere I can get internet access.

I'm able to curate the SPI (Schedule Performance Index) and the CPI (Cost Performance Index) that helps us measure the performance in regards to costs and even taxes that projects have.

I can create metrics about costs either project by project or phase by phase.

The permissions are the most valuable aspect of the solution. I can configure groups to access different information. The solution allows us to manage the project baseline very well. I can control the baselines in specific user groups, which is very useful for me.

The solution offers very good availability in that we can access it from anywhere, whenever we need to.

The usability is excellent.

We've found the user experience to be quite simple. The views and filters in particular are very good.

The reports need to be improved. It's complicated. The default views are good. However, we need more. We need to be able to compare milestones, calls, and other variables regarding the projects we are working on. I have to contract developers to make reports, which is where things get complicated. They need to develop personal and custom fields for us. We also need to use Power BI, which needs to connect with Project Server, in order to generate reports.

The scalability capabilities could be improved upon.

There should be an interaction between Microsoft's Planner app and this solution. Their Planner is a good solution. I would like them both to connect directly, with the Planner tasks in the Project plans. It would also be helpful if the solution integrated with Microsoft Teams. My company uses Office 365, and therefore it would be great if everything was integrated.

I've been using the solution for a long time. It's been longer than a decade. I'd say it's around 15 years at this point.

The solution's stability is good. Of course, it depends on the cloud provider. This is important. When you have a good cloud provider or infrastructure provider, stability is good. You have to play with the servers and processors and memory about the solution. When you have a good provider, it's no problem. When you have a bad provider, you have problems.

The scalability could be improved upon. Sometimes I want to create some instance or other Project Servers to create, for example, test environments. We need to create a test to do a pilot to sell the idea. However, it's complicated to establish what is the best instance to manage the project. 

We have about 2,000 users online, however, it depends on the cloud environment. How many users we have depends on the infrastructure provider. They ensure the scalability and stability of the environment.

We do plan to increase usage. We still have to configure new project types in the project server to gain more users. We want to achieve 1,000 users this year. Right now, I have 300 active users. The plan for this year is to include more project types in the project server throughout the environment and at the end to achieve 1,000 users, at a minimum.

I haven't really dealt with technical support. The relationship with Microsoft is in the IT area. I am not personally part of that group. I am the portfolio manager, therefore I don't have a direct relationship with Microsoft. That said, I'd say it's good, as I don't have any problems. When we have made a request to IT they answer it quickly. Therefore, I'd say we're pretty satisfied with the level of support on offer.

I used to use Clarity for our Agile projects, however, this solution is less expensive.

Clarity is good, however, it is complicated to use as it makes it more challenging for the final users to understand the project plans. Also, the templates to manage the project plans are complicated. I like Microsoft Project better than Clarity. 

At the moment, the initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. that's due to the fact that I know the solution very well. I've worked with the 2010 version as well and have ten years of experience and have used it in my everyday work for so long, the setup is not hard for me.

The deployment depends on the company and its culture. I have implemented Project Server in two months, which is pretty fast. However, it depends on the organization's needs. 

The reports, for example, are a viable gain for executive teams. When the executive teams watch good reports to manage the portfolio projects, it's easier to deploy the solution. 

My strategy is to do a pilot. Over two months, I may do ten projects. I'll generate reports and deliver good information and the executive team of the steering committee can easily see the value for the company. Once the pilot shows the value to the steering committee, I usually have the go-ahead to continue the deployment in our organization. 

We had five people for deployment and maintenance. It's a good number. You need one person, that knows the information in regards to users and other people training the other people. There should be another person working on the cost measures such as the reports. 

I handle the implementation myself. I have a good amount of experience and therefore don't need further experience. I don't need the help of integrators, resellers, or consultants.

While the solution is less expensive than Broadcomm's Clarity, it more expensive than Planview.

That said, I'm unsure of the exact pricing or how often we pay licensing.

We've also looked at Planview and Jira. We found that the solution has better technical support on offer than other options. That said, I like Planview as it's even less expensive than Project Server.

We are Microsoft Partners.

Currently, I am using Project Online and Project Server. The 2015 versions.

At the moment, I am in the process of deploying, the solution in more areas. I start with IT projects and telecom projects. Currently, I am working to introduce regular projects, marketing projects, product projects, etc. I am working to introduce more areas in the Project Server environment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at an eight.

We use Microsoft Project Server for project planning, capacity management, baselining, progress reporting, and monitoring.

Capacity management and task baselining are the most valuable features of Microsoft Project Server.

The solution's synchronization with Jira Projects should be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Project Server for more than 20 years.

Microsoft Project Server is a scalable solution. Around 100 users are using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support is good.

Positive

Microsoft Project Server’s initial setup is easy.

Microsoft Project Server is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Project Server a nine out of ten.

This is a good product but we have struggled with stability from time to time. The service has stopped intermittently and it has been difficult to find a reason why. Rebooting the system has often solved these issues. 

I have been using this solution for 20 years. 

This is a scalable solution. It is easy to set up and to add clusters to your environment. We have many clusters running for our company. 

We have had a mixed experienced with the customer support team. Some agents are technically skilled and have been able to fix our issues quickly. Others have needed to transfer our case back and forth and this has taken a long period of time. 

The deployment is very straightforward.

We deployed it by our own because we have a big team that looks after all server deployments. This same team takes care of all the maintenance support. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.