A Sneak Peek at the New Features in PM Central R2.0

While some of you are excited about the summer's movie releases (Inception, anyone?) or your fast-approaching vacation, our engineering team is tirelessly working on the next set of features for the upcoming release of SharePoint Project Management Central™ (PM Central™) R2.0.

Speaking of vacations, our product manager, Bamboo PM Girl, is at the beach with her family right now, so I'm taking advantage of her absence to give you a sneak peek at some of the high-level features in PM Central™ R2.0—just enough to whet your project-management appetites.

Feature

Description

3-Tiered Architecture

Your company has multiple tiers: executives needs to see all the reports, while individual departments such as Sales and Operations only want to see the dashboard, reports and tasks relating to their specific department. Now you can have a portfolio level/top tier, a program level/middle tier, and a project level/bottom tier.

Project Budget

Your project was approved for a certain amount of money. You need to plan your tasks (cost, work) accordingly so that you don't go over budget.

Baseline the Schedule

Your project schedule has been approved, and you want to baseline it so that you can monitor schedule and cost changes from your baseline.

Create Tasks Using Start Date & Due Date, Start Date & Work or Start Date & Duration.

With enhancements powered by SharePoint Task Master, you can create tasks based on other options such as Start Date & Due Date, Start Date & Work or Start Date & Duration.

Control Resource Allocation

Your resources don't work on just one project or one task. Now you can allocate a percentage of your resource to a project or task.

Multi-line Editing

Tired of editing tasks one at a time? The upcoming Task Master R2.0 allows you to edit multiple items.

Resource Management

If you track resources, now you can add new resources as you create and assign new tasks.

Usability

Don't know what a predecessor task is or what actual work means? Don't worry! We're adding additional descriptions and tooltips with explanations, plus a Help/Glossary section too.

More Charts

Bubble charts! Bubble what? We now have bubble charts to help you monitor risk items at both the portfolio and project levels when the project is exposed to high risk and cost.

More Options for Reports

You wanted it, you got it. Display resource allocation per month for cost and time via line graphs and bar charts.

Timer Job

We are providing the option to run the timer job immediately or based on your setting.

Are you excited yet? I know that the PM Central team certainly is. There are more features coming in PM Central™ R2.0, so be sure to check back here on the Bamboo Team Blog for more PM Central™-related news.

Can't get enough of PM Central™? Then check out a screencast of PM Central R1.8 for SharePoint 2010, visit PM Central on our storefront or sign up for a webinar.