Bamboo Project Management Central™ has gone through a number of iterations as we’ve continuously improved the application to provide our customers the functionalities that best extend SharePoint for project management. As with all of our products, one of the benefits of PM Central that we’ve always focused on is its ease of use. So when we started hearing from some customers that it’s hard to create a project in PM Central, as the product manager for PM Central, I was troubled. Since its inception, at minimum, I have created thousands of projects in PM Central while reviewing the product. At Bamboo, we believe that intuitive navigation is just as important as the features of our products, and that users shouldn’t have to read the online documentation in order to (for example) create a project in PM Central.

To put the ease of use of creating a project in PM Central to the test, we solicited a guinea pig in the form of a co-worker who had never before touched PM Central. With a PM Central site in front of her for the first time, she was unable to create a project site. I asked her why she was having difficulty and, specifically, why was it not apparent that she could just go to Central Actions and select Add New Project, as shown here:

She indicated that she had been unsure if she was “allowed to touch anything” in the Central Actions and Site Actions menus. Yikes.

To address this issue, an experience which I was certain that other users must have shared, we added to the page a shortcut for creating Project and Department sites in the 4.0 release. Creating a project is now a simple, one-click process:

We also now provide users instant access to the Help file without requiring them to navigate to the Online Documentation. For example, are you unsure which template to use? Simply clicking the Help button will open up a table with a description of each of the templates:

Those are just some of the many new improvements we’ve added to PM Central’s user interface and, ultimately, to the user experience as related to input and output. We strive to improve our products, and your input is invaluable. Please continue to provide feedback in the PM Central forum. New to PM Central? We invite you to sign up for a free webinar, check out a 30-day free trial, or evaluate the application without any need for installation in a private or public sandbox environment.