The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution is an end-to-end collaborative project and portfolio environment.

The Office EPM Solution helps your organization gain visibility, insight, and control across all work, enhancing decision-making, improving alignment with business strategy, maximizing resource utilization, and measuring and helping to increase operational efficiency.

The Office EPM Solution includes the following products from the Microsoft Office Project 2007 family to provide organizations with an end-to-end project portfolio management (PPM) solution:

• Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007: Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 includes all the capabilities in Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007. Office Project Professional 2007 gives you robust project management tools with the right blend of usability, power, and flexibility, so you can manage projects more efficiently and effectively. You can stay informed, control project work, schedules, and finances, and keep project teams aligned, while becoming more productive through powerful reporting options, integration with familiar Microsoft Office system programs, guided planning, wizards, and templates. In addition, Office Project Professional 2007 provides EPM capabilities when connected to Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.
  
  
• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007: Office Project Server 2007 is the flexible platform that supports the resource management, scheduling, reporting, and collaboration capabilities in the Office EPM Solution. Office Project Server 2007 enables organizations to store project and resource information centrally and consistently. It also integrates with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for file management and collaboration capabilities, helping team members to work together more effectively. Further, based on their roles, users can access data and functionality via the Internet with Microsoft Office Project Web Access.
  
  
• Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007: Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 is a top-down portfolio management solution that helps organizations to realize their potential by identifying, selecting, managing, and delivering portfolios that best align with their business strategy. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 integrates with Office Project Server 2007 to provide organizations with an end-to-end project portfolio management solution, accessed via Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Web Access.

Manage and control all types of work

• Standardize and communicate a governance framework across the organization.
• Consolidate essential data for all business and IT investments in a centralized repository.
• Effectively deliver project and program portfolios that help maximize return on investment.
• Gain transparency and control across your existing application portfolios.
• Manage work from simple proposals to complex programs of projects.

An example of the Project Center view in Office Project Web Access.

Improve visibility and insight to enhance decision-making

• Objectively prioritize, optimize, and select the project portfolio that aligns with your business strategy and maximizes return on investment.
• Proactively predict cost, resource, and schedule overruns through key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Create custom views (such as Dashboards or Scorecards) and reports to gain transparency across all projects, programs, and application portfolios.
• Analyze information, and then use predefined reports or create a custom report to expose project-related information.

An example of what-if optimization scenarios run under varying budgetary constraints in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007.

Effectively communicate and collaborate with all stakeholders

• Effortlessly collaborate and share essential information through team project workspaces that use Windows SharePoint Services.
• Keep teams aligned through task assignments and timesheet reporting.
• Confidently initiate, plan, and track projects whether in or out of the office.
• Use built-in integration to communicate project-related information through Microsoft Office system applications.

An example home page with personalized content and links to project workspaces.

Evolve with a scalable and configurable platform

• Take advantage of embedded best practices and templates to simplify configuration and deployment and quickly realize a return on investments.
• Effectively integrate and share data with line-of-business solutions.
• Scale up and out with confidence using the newly redesigned server architecture.
• Tap into all of the Project Web Access capabilities through their exposure as Web services.
• Incorporate business processes by using the Windows Workflow Service support for the Office Project Server 2007 new event model.
• Develop custom solutions using a Microsoft .NET Framework–based server application programming interface (API) and server-side scheduling engine.

An architectural overview of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution.