As a person who has experience with many Enterprise Project Management (EPM) tools, I am always interested to read what Gartner has to say about the pros and cons of the leaders in its 'Magic Quadrant.' I'll leave it up to you to decide how much importance there is in these studies, but below is an excerpt from this year's summary on Microsoft's 2010 EPM tool:
Strengths
- The 2010 version of EPM is built on Microsoft SharePoint Server, providing support and inclusion of SharePoint's business collaboration capabilities, a common user interface, data integration, search functions, and reporting infrastructures.
- The 2010 version of EPM combines Microsoft's portfolio management capabilities and its centralized project management features (previously in two separate but integrated products) into a single, unified product with a common repository and data flow.
- The 2010 release of EPM adds support for managing projects and work requests during the demand collection, proposal, business case generation, and approval/rejection phases of a typical project life cycle.
Cautions
- Currently, Microsoft only offers a SaaS version of EPM through its network of certified EPM hosting partners.
- Microsoft EPM provides limited preconfigured reports and dashboards. Users will need to create and modify their own reports using Excel and Excel Services, the added Report Wizard, or the PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. Alternatively, more-advanced reports can also be developed using SQL Reporting Services, which generally require a skilled IT resource.
- Microsoft EPM does not yet provide strong, out-of-the-box "budget versus actuals" reporting at the portfolio level, but customers can meet these requirements with custom fields, by extending Excel Services integration or with a number of existing add-on modules available from the Microsoft partner network. In addition, EPM provides integration and bridges to third-party financial management systems.
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