Kudos to the Bamboo Engineering and QA team! After a long wait and mounting anticipation, I’m proud to announce the release of PM Central R4.0 for SharePoint 2010. In this release, PM Central has bulked up with a lot of enhancements, including many based on feedback from our existing customers which improve the user experience, and better management for administrators and project managers, as well as must-have features such as the #1 request of all time: for users to be able to “Assign multiple resources to a task.”

High Level PM Central Features:

Task and Schedule Management:

• Task Assignments and Resources – Assign multiple resources to the same task. Provide the option to exclude lunchtime. Additional conditions for Adjusting Task

(See the Task Master R3.5 release announcement blog post for more information.)

• Schedule: Change a task’s duration, total work, or due date when resource assignments are changed based on task conditions, e.g., keep duration constant, keep total work constant, but increase or decrease the hours that resources work per day.

(See the Task Master R3.5 release announcement blog post for more information.)

• Microsoft Project 2010 Additional Integration Features – Map Resource Names from Microsoft Project to either the Resource field or the Assigned To field. Support Forms-Based Authentication (FBA):

 

• Task, Issue, and Risks Phase Status – Application hides tasks, issues, and risks, and excludes them from project schedule and reports when their phase status is Inactive.
• Task, Issue, and Risks Project Status – Application hides tasks, issues, and risks from reports and portfolio display when their project status is not active.
• Associate Issues and Risks with Tasks – Tasks can be delayed due to issues and risks. You can now associate risks and issues with related tasks.
• Baseline – Automatically gives users with full control permission the ability to baseline, and provides the option to add groups that can baseline via the Web Part Settings.
• Additional Tools for Tasks and Schedule Management – Provides quick buttons to Update All (Project schedule, project cost, actual progress, project’s overall cost and work) or update specific values, such as project cost):

 

Cost and Resource Management:

• Find Resources – Resource or project managers can now find the available resources based on name, department, or role of the resource:

 

• Copy Resources – Resource or project managers can now copy multiple resources all at once from the Enterprise Resource Pool to the project’s resource pool:

 

 

• Assignments Department – Displays resources and their assignments, grouped department:

 

• Enterprise Resource Pool (ERP) – Drop-down displays resources in alphabetical order.

Reports:

• Additional Reports – Assignments Department, Resource Department.
• Additional Settings for Reports – Allows users the flexibility to show grid above the chart, or chart at the top of the report. Show chart using stacked bar in addition to bar and line.

Customization:

“Lite” and “Standalone” Site Templates – Includes standalone project, lite portfolio, and lite project site templates for loosely structured organizations and/or those which otherwise don’t have a need to track or manage certain areas that PM specialists are required to manage, such as resource management, time management, and budget and cost management. The “lite” sites can be turned into “full” sites through feature activation.

Best Practices & Process Management:

Lessons Learned – As part of project management best practices, PM Central now allows you to log lessons learned as part of project close-out or end of a phase. 

Administration, Usability & User Experience:

• Site Creation Area – Site Collection Administrators can activate the “Site Creation Area” feature to allow the “Create New Site” option and “Create New Site” area for portfolio site or standalone project site creation.
• Shortcut to Site Creation – Users can now create the project site or the department site from the shortcut on the portfolio site.
• Display different column names in the data view – Your organizations may refer to certain tracking information in a certain way, such as Work Effort instead of Work. In R4.0, we provide this flexibility for the data view. Display columns different names when the data is displayed using Data-Viewer Web Part:

 

• Department Directories – For the three tiers (portfolio, department, and project), the All Department Sites Web Part that shows the departments and their paths to the sites can now be modified, e.g., to display or hide columns.
• Show or Hide columns of list forms – Provides the flexibility to show or hide columns in a new form, edit form, view form, and in list settings for the Tasks list and the Project Health list. This allows you to not show unnecessary fields to your team members:

 

• Archive tool – Provides the ability for you to archive tasks, issues, risks lists, and their items. This provides you the flexibility to continue using the projects and the lists and at the same time keep history data:

 

• Security and Access Control – New PM Central Control Panel in which tools, resource center, and reports are located, and which only users with full control can access:

 

Early adopters, stay tuned: PM Central will also be available for SharePoint 2013 later this year.

As with all Bamboo products, we invite you to sign up for a free webinar or check out a 30-day free trial of PM Central. Don’t have the time, permission, or inclination to install?  No problem – you can play with it on our sandbox. As always, our product enhancements are driven listening to our loyal customers, and adding the critical enhancements that you require in order to further increase your project management efficiency.

---