Microsoft Project Server 2010 - End Of Support coming soon
October 13, 2020 isn’t a Friday, and it’s still 18 days before Halloween on October 31. But it’s a scary day if you’re using Microsoft Project Server 2010. October 13th, 2020 marks the end of extended-support for Microsoft Project Server 2010, and of course the related desktop tool Project Professional 2010.
Fear not, you do have a couple of great options to get fully supported on your Microsoft Project implementation. But you do need to get working on this now.
(If you are still using Microsoft Project Server 2007, you’re long out of support. If you’re using Microsoft Project Server 2013, mainstream support ended in 2018, and extended support ends in 2023. If you’re on 2016 then you have mainstream support until July 2021. So, you’ll want to consider your plans for any of those too.)
2. Continual Investment & Innovation
Throughout time, Microsoft has continued to evolve the Microsoft Project family and add innovation to make it easier to use and more powerful. Today’s Microsoft Project includes Microsoft Project Server 2019 and Microsoft Project Online. These two products provide a familiar user interface for anyone who is used to Project 2010 – both in the client and the server. But, they’re better.
Microsoft Project Server 2019 is the on-premises version – which will be familiar territory to anyone using Microsoft Project Server 2010. In the short decade since the introduction of Project Server 2010, the IT world has rapidly moved from on-premises to cloud deployments. That’s what Microsoft Project Online brings to the party. It is largely the same as Microsoft Project Server, with the exception that you don’t need to own and maintain the hardware and software to run it, and you don’t need an IT team to keep it updated with patches and upgrades. Microsoft Project Online is maintained by Microsoft and it has historically been both fast and stable.
Microsoft Project Server 2019 and Project Online provide a range of functionality including:
• Project workflows / gating
• Idea intake
• Proposal scoring
• Proposal selection into projects and portfolios
• Portfolio budgeting
• Portfolio capacity planning
• Portfolio visibility
• Resource visibility
• Schedule templates
• Project site templates
• Resource assignment & allocation
• Project document management
• Risks & Issues
• Project Status reports
• Custom forms & workflows for change requests, and more
• … and even more.
3. Your Upgrade Path
Western Principles can help you with your roadmap to move from your current instance of Microsoft Project Server and your future implementation.
Most importantly in this discussion, is how you can use Microsoft Project more and better. Everyone knows that Microsoft Project does scheduling. But, in Western Principles’ experience, few organizations are really using Microsoft Project as well as they could be. You can lower your overall PPM costs and increase your PPM effectiveness by leveraging the built-in capabilities in Microsoft Project.
Your upgrade to Microsoft Project Server 2019 or Microsoft Project Online gives you the opportunity to revisit your PPM business processes and tools, and standardize and centralize your practices to align business decisions with your business strategies so that you can deliver projects better.
5. Summing it all up
Using an old and unsupported version of Microsoft Project Server like 2010? You need to move to a new version of Microsoft Project Server or to Project Online. If for no other reason than you need to eliminate the risks of technical debt from your IT environment. But there are better reasons to move to the latest version of Microsoft Project Server or Project Online, and that’s to drive business benefits with the latest features. (If you need help with a business case, ask us. We do that.)
Whether you go with Microsoft Project Server 2019 or Microsoft Project Online, we recommend that you plan to use more of the built-in capabilities in these solutions, to drive business benefits. We can help you configure these and help you get additional business value from Microsoft Project that will help you deliver your projects and programs better and faster.
For next steps, we can work through a discovery meeting with you, to learn more about your situation and needs. From that, we can provide a demo which will help you imagine your new PPM system and how your team will use it. Based on those steps, you will be able to answer the nine questions we laid out above, and we will use this to formulate our Statement of Work with you, so that we can start to work together and get you on a new, stable, and fully supported Microsoft Project platform.
Reach out to us at 1-800-578-4155 or [email protected] for more information.