White Papers

The Project Viewer Manifesto

June 2005, PDF, 4 pages

[click to download]

Summary: With the emergence and acceptance of the enterprise project management (EPM) model, many organizations are standardizing on project management tools and methodologies. For a large number of companies, this involves purchasing volume licenses of Microsoft® Project. Two problems arise: first, many users don’t need the full functionality offered by Microsoft® Project. Second, project managers are increasingly frustrated by unauthorized modifications to the files they author and maintain.

The solution to both of these problems is to provide Microsoft® Project to the group of users who truly need it (project creators) and to provide project viewers for the rest of the users (project consumers) who only need access to the information in the file. The use of project viewers results in significant cost savings and is a much better match between the needs of the users and the solution that is provided.

When selecting a viewer, you should make sure that the solution you choose is low cost, easy to use, desktop-based, and legal.