Bamboo is pleased to announce that PM Central™, the leading project management solution for SharePoint, is now available for SharePoint 2010.  As a member of Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Bamboo was involved in the development of SharePoint 2010 since late 2008, and the official product launch last month was cause for great celebration.  Quite frankly, we love SharePoint 2010, and the core project management features that are now available out-of-the-box are certainly no exception.  PM Central for SharePoint 2010 leverages the enhanced project management capabilities of the new platform to deliver a fully integrated, even more powerful solution for your project management in SharePoint.

As an aside, each of the standalone Web Parts which are included in PM Central are also now available individually for trial and purchase for the new platform, making a sizable portion of Bamboo's 60+ product line instantly available on SharePoint 2010.  An upcoming post from Jeff Kozloff will provide details on those individual components, but it's my pleasure to share the details on the release of PM Central for SharePoint 2010 with you now.

What can you expect in the PM Central for SharePoint 2010?

1. Compatibility with both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.
2. All of the powerful features available in the SharePoint 2007 version that you've found to be indispensible for project management in SharePoint, such as:

Feature	Description
Standardized Site Template	Includes Top-Level Site and Project Site templates for providing summary portfolio information at the top-level site and controlling how project information is collected at the individual project sites.
Resource Management	Enterprise Resource Pool, Gantt view, resource allocation and capacity planning for resource management and more. Includes list and ad-hoc reporting for resource planning and availability.
Team Notifications	Enables users to email user groups directly from the site with information on announcements, events or reports.
Alerts	Allows users to set up customizable alerts reminding team members of their issues/tasks, when tasks are coming due or past due, or when a status has changed on a task or issue. Alert conditions are customizable.
Document Management	Organize and view documents in tree view.
Project Management Updates	From the Project site, view all tasks, overdue tasks, my tasks, late tasks, a cost view, tracking view and schedule view. Edit and view dependencies between tasks via Task Master, a Web-based project scheduling tool. View schedule status from the Portfolio site by project as well as at the task level.
Dashboard	High-level dashboard and visual KPI display project health, risks and issues.

Note: SharePoint 2010 offers core project management features such as Create Task Summary, sub task and predecessor, and PM Central for SharePoint 2010 leverages these out-of-the-box features to enhance and complement the new platform. For example, the Task Summary and sub task features in SharePoint 2010 offer users the ability to view tasks as directories or folders, but you'll need PM Central via SharePoint Task Master component to see those tasks in an intuitve, schedule-based tree view display with collapse and expand functionality.  Even more critically, SharePoint 2010's predecessor option offers users the ability to view the links between tasks in Gantt View, but since  inter-dependency between tasks isn't an out-of-the-box feature in SharePoint 2010, changing the date of a predecessor will not have any effect on the dates of its successors; PM Central for SharePoint 2010 handles inter-dependency between predecessors and successors, and between task summaries and sub tasks, for you automatically and seamlessly.

3. PM Central for SharePoint 2010 requires a new license key. Please review our SharePoint 2010 Bamboo Product FAQ for information on how to get a new key if you have already purchased this product for SharePoint 2007 and would like to run PM Central on SharePoint 2010.

4. The installation process of PM Central for SharePoint 2010 is similar to the 2007 experience. You will need to follow KB.12464 for installation best practices, such as a farm admin account is required to install, shut down WWW Publishing Service, etc.

5. As you know, navigation in SharePoint 2010 has changed from the 2007 experience, and may take some getting used to.  Some examples of these navigational changes include.:

• Central Actions menu is now on the left. If you are used to looking at the top right corner of your display, be advised that these options will now be now found in the opposite corner.

 

•  Instead of breadcrumbs, you will now see a navigation folder for your use in navigating between different levels:

 

• List Settings and Items Settings are now available through the Ribbon.
• Modify Web Part has been renamed to Edit Web Part.
• Bamboo List Print is now available under the List tab options of the List Tools in the Ribbon since the Actions drop down menu is no longer available in SharePoint 2010.

 

6. PM Central’s reports in SharePoint 2010 have been improved visually, as has the exported/printed output of those reports:

We're currently hard at work to deliver 2010-compatible versions of all of the remaining products in our PM Suite, and we will be incorporating new features that are available out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2010 to future releases of PM Central.  Please stay tuned for more details on those releases, but the 2010-compatible release of version 1.8 of PM Central is available now for your free trial download or purchase, and we're eager to hear your feedback!